NBA files motion to dismiss Warner Bros. Discovery lawsuit - ESPN

The NBA has asked the New York Supreme Court to dismiss a lawsuit by Warner Bros. Discovery, which alleged that the league breached its contract by rejecting WBD's matching offer for a new media rights deal and instead signing with Amazon.

The league filed its motion for a dismissal late Friday, and it contained the NBA's pointed reply on several fronts to WBD's lawsuit filed July 26 — two days after the NBA signed a new 11-year media rights deal worth nearly $76 billion with Disney (parent company of ESPN), NBC and Amazon Prime Video that runs from the 2025-26 season through the 2035-36 season.

That new media rights deal effectively ends a nearly four-decade business relationship between the NBA and Turner, which began airing NBA games in the 1984-85 season.

In a 28-page filing, along with supporting documents, the NBA asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it couldn't be refiled in the future.

The NBA specifically argued that Warner Bros. Discovery — the parent company of Turner — attempted to improperly rewrite the terms of Amazon's offer and then accept those terms.

«TBS chose not to match NBCUniversal's offer, which would have enabled TBS to continue distributing games via its TNT linear cable network,» the league 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.»

Amazon's offer was roughly $1.8 billion per year, and NBC's was roughly $2.45 billion per year.

Specifically, the league said that Warner Bros. Discovery «made substantive revisions to eight of the Amazon offer's 27 sections (including revisions to 22 different subsections), changed 11 defined