Do you remember when we used to play basketball together?

Oh yeah, how could I forget it was legendary?

We had the greatest team name I think of all time.

You're going to have to remind me.

The Ball Street Journal.

Oh, yes, yes.

That's our colleague Amol Sharma.

Yes, which could do everything except Ball. We were very good on the street journal part, but.

Hey, look, I mean, speak for other people. I'm not going to name names here, but you and I were not bad.

I think we were carrying we were carrying some people yeah.

Aside from being a great basketball teammate,

Amol is also the media and entertainment editor. And like me, he's been watching a lot of

playoff basketball lately. But he's also been paying attention to another drama at the National Basketball

Association. So the NBA is negotiating its first round of media deals in a decade.

Television and streaming companies are fighting for the rights to broadcast NBA games.

The league itself is hoping that it can rake in tens of billions of dollars over a decade

from the TV and streaming deals and that funds everything. I mean

players have a huge stake in this the money that pays their salaries comes out of

these media deals. And for the media companies themselves, like Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery, the

stakes are also really high.

They all need live sports badly to help their own bottom line because the only thing that's really

keeping a lot of households from cutting the cable cord is the ability to watch

...