Owners are widely expected to lock the players out in early December, when the current collective bargaining agreement expires. The 2027 schedule is already out, with Opening Day set for March 24. What happens after that is now tied to a clause buried in the national television contracts.
If a lockout wipes out at least 60 games of the 2027 season, most of those deals automatically extend an extra year, through 2029. Evan Drellich and Andrew Marchand of The Athletic reported the threshold on Sept. 25. Forbes had flagged the extension language in July without the number attached. The current national packages — Fox, TNT Sports, ESPN, NBC, Netflix, Apple and the rest — are built to expire after 2028. Cross 60 missed games and the reset the league wants in 2029 gets pushed to 2030.
That is the loss that matters. It is not a bounced check in April. It is a delayed market.
National rights currently bring in roughly $2 billion a year. Sports Business Journal has put the stack at about that figure from Fox (about $729 million), ESPN (about $550 million), Turner (about $470 million), NBC (about $200 million) and Netflix (about $50 million), with Apple’s Friday Night Baseball package on top of that at roughly $85 million. Those partners are still on the hook for 2027 even if no games are played. A fully canceled season would still deliver that money, about 17 percent of a league that has cleared $12 billion in annual revenue. Gate receipts, parking and concessions would not. Those stop the day the turnstiles do.
The television protection has a back end. If the entire 2027 season is lost, the networks pay for 2027 and pay nothing for the extra 2029 season they would otherwise owe. If the league misses 60 or more games and then plays a shortened schedule, the networks still owe something for 2029, described in the reporting as a bargain rate scaled to how much of 2027 actually got played. Either path hands the partners another year at something close to today’s price.
Today’s price is the problem. The NBA’s national packages average about $7 billion a year, more than triple baseball’s national haul. The NFL sits above $11 billion. Commissioner Rob Manfred has spent this cycle lining the national deals up so they all come due after 2028, with an eye on selling a much larger package once local rights can be pulled toward the center. Braves chairman Terry McGuirk, a former television executive, has floated a figure in the neighborhood of $100 billion over 11 years for a fully nationalized product. That is an owner’s hope, not a signed contract. Even a more modest jump — say, a deal that merely doubles the current $2 billion — is a billion-plus a year the clubs do not collect if 2029 is still spoken for.
Spread across 30 teams, an extra $2 billion in national money is about $67 million a club before the usual central-fund splits. An extra $4 billion, closer to closing the NBA gap, is about $133 million a club. One delayed year at that scale is the bill for crossing the line. Craig Sloan of Playfly Sports told The Athletic it is “a massive incentive for these entities to come together to a resolution,” because nobody on the rights side wants to push back “what will be a multiple in growth on the total media rights being brought to market.”
The calendar makes the tripwire concrete. Sixty missed games from a March 24 opener lands in late May or early June, depending on off days and how the league would have stacked the schedule. That is the point at which a lockout stops being a spring problem and becomes a media-rights problem.
Local television does not wait that long. Most regional sports network deals guarantee something in the range of 125 to 145 games. Miss enough of those and the rebates start on a pro-rata basis, weeks before the national 60-game clause ever triggers. Clubs that already took haircuts when the old Diamond Sports deals collapsed feel that sooner than the big-market teams still collecting full local fees. National money from the central fund is about 26 percent of team revenue on average. Local broadcast is about 21 percent. A long lockout hits the second pile first.
For the players, the clause is leverage they did not have to bargain for. Owners can absorb a dark April because the national checks still arrive and the players’ salaries do not. They cannot as easily absorb a dark June if it costs them the 2029 market. The union does not have to win the argument about a salary cap or a floor on the merits for that date to matter. It only has to still be locked out when the 60th game comes off the board.
None of this says a deal gets done before December, or before March, or before June. Manfred has called lockouts the new normal, and the 2021-22 stoppage still produced a full 162-game season after a short delay. The difference this time is a number written into the television contracts. Sixty games is no longer just a fraction of a season. It is the point at which the owners stop getting paid to wait and start paying, in a year they cannot get back, for the wait itself.
