Last Saturday evening, blessedly, the only obligation on my calendar was to enjoy the
Knicks-Lakers game with my 11-year-old son from the comfort of our TV room. I’d been looking forward to it all week long, in fact—a reward at the end of yet another extraordinarily busy week at our fast-growing business. It was an enjoyable moment of parental circumspection, too. The Knicks, who’ve been depressingly miserable for much of the past quarter century, are having their most exciting regular season since the early ’90s, when I was around my son’s age.
Right from the tip-off, though, I got a spidey sense that this wasn’t going to be our evening. LeBron James looked like a younger version of himself, chasing down loose balls and effortlessly elevating for dunks that I remembered from his first tour in Cleveland, back when he was in short pants. Meanwhile, the Knicks’ two young stars, Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, were in retrograde. The game seemed lost by the
third quarter, and got so far out of hand during the fourth that the Lakers were able to insert Bronny James, a bench player who happens to be LeBron’s son. After the contest mercifully ended, I half-listened to the elder James’s postgame interview with ESPN. I was taken aback by his effusive praise of his copilot, Anthony Davis, who had missed the game due to injury—I mean, LeBron seemed to be really hamming it up. Nice guy, I thought, before lumbering
off to bed.
Hours later, of course, ESPN would break the news that the Lakers had pulled off the most consequential midseason trade in modern NBA history. Shortly after midnight, Davis was off to Dallas, poor guy, in return for the 25-year-old Slovenian wunderkind Luka Dončić. A balance of power had shifted, and the economics were poised to follow. But also: The trade made zero sense on its face. Even a casual fan would
understand that Dončić was a far more valuable player than Davis. Perhaps that’s why LeBron had been so effusive, after all?
Soon after I learned the news, on Sunday morning, I told my son, who was aghast in a delightfully 11-year-old boy sort of way. Then I texted my partner John Ourand. John, an empty nester who still remembers the hours of engagement required at my stage of
parenthood, responded immediately, affirming that he’d find out the real story in time for the latest issue of The Varsity, his genre-defining private email focused on the sports media business. As I took my first sip of coffee, I couldn’t wait to see what he would unearth.
The next afternoon, John sent over a draft of his latest blockbuster, The Secret Culprit in the Luka-A.D. Trade—possibly my favorite piece in his growing oeuvre at Puck. Indeed, John had determined that one of the sinister forces at play in the background of the trade was the declining regional sports networks business.
Longtime Puck enthusiasts may be familiar with these
so-called R.S.N.s—the local cable channels that used to make a mint by broadcasting live baseball, basketball, or hockey games within a single local market. Alas, this industry has been profoundly upended by cord-cutting, contraction, and unfriendly economics, to the point where the Mavericks now make only $45 million a year to broadcast their games in Dallas.
And yet the Lakers, as John reported, are one of the last remaining outliers, via
their $200 million annual agreement—the richest in the league—with Spectrum SportsNet. In fact, the capitulation of the Dallas R.S.N. business is likely one reason that the Mavs’ bombastic owner, Mark Cuban, recently sold his controlling interest in the team to the Adelson family, who appear to have grand designs of amortizing the club’s value via hospitality and gaming, their hallmark. “As the R.S.N. business continues to crater, the local media environments in
both markets certainly played a part in this deal,” John noted in his piece. “Luka, after all, was on pace to demand a five-year $345 million deal this summer. Sure, the NBA’s $77 billion national media deals will kick in next season, but it’s hard to see how the Mavs could afford to keep the star Slovenian guard while countenancing the dislocation of its local rights situation.”
The machinations of the sports media business may not always rise to the level of
global significance as some of Puck’s other power corners. (To wit: I’d behoove you to spend some time devouring Peter Hamby’s recent chat with a presidential-sounding JB Pritzker, or Tara Palmeri’s illuminating conversation with John Fetterman.) But they reflect how intertwined our society has become. The morning after the trade, executives at Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery were combing through their schedules to see how many times LeBron and his new dance partner would show up. (And, as Eriq Gardner reported, the answer may or may not have been enough to distract David Zaslav from the latest headache in his portfolio.) Indeed, this is one of the great stories of our time, and precisely what you should expect to read about in Puck.
