The new media rights agreement presented fresh challenges for Adam Silver and NBA officials. Their partnership with Amazon Prime Video forced Warner Bros. Discovery to seek legal assistance to reclaim previous rights that the league did not honor. This incident left a sour taste in Silver’s mouth, a sentiment he recently expressed.

The league commissioner sat with CNBC reporter Alex Sherman to discuss various aspects of the sport and one of them was the legal battle with the $18.44 billion company that is under process. “He (Silver) sort of lamented not being able to come to a deal with Warner Brothers Discovery, which has had an almost 40-year partnership,” Sherman informed his colleagues after his interview with Silver.

He also added that Turner Sports owned by Warner Bros. Discovery will lose ties with the NBA due to the litigation. “They’re actually suing the NBA right now to potentially still try to get in there, and have a media package deal, but we’ll see how that bears out,” Sherman said.

NBA officials requested the New York Supreme Court to dismiss the case in August presenting a 28-page report. As per ESPN, the league stated, “TBS chose not to match NBCUniversal’s offer, which would have enabled TBS to continue distributing games via its TNT linear cable network.”

In response to the WBD’s claim that the NBA breached their contract by accepting the same offer from Amazon and not them, the NBA wrote, “Instead, TBS purported to match the less-expensive Amazon offer, but only after revising it to include traditional distribution rights and making numerous other substantive changes.” However, Silver still regrets breaking the four-decade partnership but in the field of business, one has to focus on the Pros.

Silver further addressed the future of the NBA and highlighted the controversial topic of how the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) could be beneficial for the sport.

Adam Silver speaks in favor of AI in the NBA

With AI taking over many industries, sports should not be an exception. At least that’s what Adam Silver and the NBA officials seem to agree upon. Sherman believes that the 62-year-old wants to use the technology to speed up the game. There wouldn’t be any need to replay the game for calls as AI will be looking over it like it does in Tennis.

“We’re hoping through Hawkeye-type technology that we can automate those calls,” Silver said in the interview. “There’ll be some animation that will quickly show, so it’s not a black box. That’s what the AI is demonstrating. Because remember in Hawkeye, it’s sometimes people watch it, think it’s just a video replay. It’s not video. It’s an AI recreation of the ball hitting.”

The reporters discussed that the crowd could be enjoying the animation and underlined the best part would be no argument between the players and the robot. There’s an additional assurance that it won’t replace the game officials. But to see the changes in full effect, the fans will need to wait till the 2025-26 season to find out exactly how they’ll turn out to be.