DHJ Quick Take: The End of the RSN Era
- The Blueprint for Survival: While 13 NBA teams scramble to find a broadcast home for next season, the Dallas Mavericks have already provided the definitive roadmap for navigating a post-RSN landscape.
- Prioritizing Reach Over Rights Fees: By shifting from FanDuel Sports Network to a “Reach-First” model—anchored by free over-the-air access via TEGNA and the MavsTV app—the franchise traded shrinking, unstable cable checks for a massive expansion in fan touchpoints and local ad upside.
- A Shift in Franchise Value: As Mark Cuban anticipated, the era of relying on guaranteed television contracts is over; the new competitive advantage lies in owned-and-operated distribution that allows teams to control their digital future and fan data.
DALLAS — The RSN model that defined how NBA fans watched local games for three decades is collapsing in real time, and 13 franchises now face the same crossroads the Dallas Mavericks navigated ahead of their own transition.
The NBA has officially informed those teams — all affiliated with Main Street Sports Group, formerly known as Diamond Sports Group and operator of FanDuel Sports Network — that they are free to pursue new in-market media rights deals ahead of the 2026-27 season, according to Sports Business Journal. The network is headed toward insolvency and will cease broadcasting for those clubs when the regular season concludes on April 12.
A spokesperson for Main Street Sports Group confirmed the timeline in a statement to Dallas Hoops Journal: “FanDuel Sports Network has reached agreements with the NBA and NHL to broadcast games and other programming through the end of the 2026 NBA regular season and the end of the first round of the NHL playoffs. We are preparing to wind down our operations upon seasons’ end unless we reach a strategic transaction. We’re pleased to finish out the NBA and NHL seasons, and we appreciate the collaborative relationships we have enjoyed with our team and league partners as well as the connections we have fostered with local fans.”
The affected franchises are the Oklahoma City Thunder, San Antonio Spurs, Detroit Pistons, Cleveland Cavaliers, Los Angeles Clippers, Miami Heat, Minnesota Timberwolves, Orlando Magic, Charlotte Hornets, Atlanta Hawks, Indiana Pacers, Memphis Grizzlies, and Milwaukee Bucks.
None of those clubs has received rights fee payments from Main Street in 2026, though multiple sources told SBJ that each team could recover up to 60% of its lost television revenue once dissolution agreements with the NBA and Main Street are finalized. Those lost payments have already shaved $1 million off the 2026-27 salary cap projection — a figure that could nudge back upward if partial recovery is secured.
The league has urged the affected franchises to pursue short-term agreements — one-year deals or contracts with early opt-out clauses — in anticipation of a league-run local streaming hub. That hub is not expected to be ready before the 2027-28 season at the earliest, leaving teams in a holding pattern for at least one broadcast cycle.
Indiana Pacers CEO Mel Raines confirmed the team is casting a wide net, exploring both over-the-air and direct-to-consumer options. DAZN has been aggressively reaching out to affected clubs with an eye toward operating that future streaming hub. Amazon, YouTube TV, and the ESPN app have also been identified as potential competitors for that project.
The Dallas Mavericks Have Been Here
While those 13 franchises are just now confronting the RSN collapse, the Mavericks have already lived through it. Dallas mutually agreed with Diamond Sports Group to terminate its Bally Sports Southwest rights deal as the company sank into bankruptcy and distribution on major streaming platforms became increasingly limited. The writing was on the wall: the traditional RSN model had become difficult for fans to access and financially precarious for everyone involved.
Rather than wait for a buyer or a league solution, the Mavericks moved. The franchise signed a multi-year local rights agreement with TEGNA, centered on the Dallas-Fort Worth station KFAA-TV, with simulcasts available on WFAA. At least 70 games landed on free, over-the-air television in the first season, with carriage extended to TEGNA stations across Texas markets, including Waco, Tyler, Midland-Odessa, Abilene, and San Angelo.
The Mavericks say the arrangement nearly tripled the number of households that can receive their local broadcasts — reaching roughly 10 million people across more than 3.1 million Texas homes, the largest local reach in franchise history. TEGNA and WFAA handle local and regional ad and sponsorship sales around those games, leaning on broadcast stations’ established infrastructure rather than the subscription revenue model that crippled the RSN ecosystem.
The transition came in phases. Local coverage shifted to KFAA-TV and WFAA after a 10-game test run proved fan interest and advertiser demand, before the full exit from Bally was completed.
The “next phase,” per then-CEO Cynt Marshall, was to build a dedicated streaming product for fans without access to antennas or traditional television. That materialized as MavsTV, a direct-to-consumer subscription service available through TV.Mavs.com and the MavsTV app on mobile, tablet, browser, Apple TV, Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, and select smart TVs. In-market subscribers — the service is territory-gated by ZIP code across parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana — get access to all non-nationally televised games, plus archives, highlights, and original programming.
The result is a dual-track local model: free over-the-air broadcasts on KFAA-TV and WFAA for antenna viewers, and MavsTV for those who prefer streaming. Out-of-market fans still route through League Pass or national television, but the old Bally paywall that frustrated so many Dallas fans is gone.
Mark Cuban Saw the RSN Model Breaking Before It Broke
The ideological groundwork for this pivot was laid even before the TEGNA deal. When Mark Cuban sold a controlling interest in the Mavericks in January 2024, he was candid about where the franchise’s value was headed. Cuban said at the time that the sale “makes revenue from media rights deals much less of a concern for the Mavericks,” framing the real competitive advantage as what an ownership group can build around a team rather than what it collects from a television contract. He also pointed directly to the Adelson-Dumont group’s real estate and development capabilities as the future edge — a tacit acknowledgment that RSN revenue was already flattening as a driver of franchise value.
Cuban has said in broader interviews about cord-cutting that the core issue is not shrinking interest in the NBA, but a distribution model that no longer fits how people consume content. He has described himself as skeptical of the old carriage-fee model for regional sports networks and has backed the idea that teams need to rethink distribution, pricing, and the in-arena experience rather than leaning on RSN checks to do the heavy lifting.
The path the Mavericks took — free broadcast distribution layered with a direct streaming product, funded through local ad sales rather than RSN subscription fees — mirrors what the New Orleans Pelicans and a handful of other forward-thinking franchises have already done. It is now, effectively, the model the rest of the league is scrambling to replicate.
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