With NBA and NHL teams now laser-focused on offseason business, Scripps Sports — with local rights to five hockey teams and one basketball team — is in acquisition mode. Scripps already locked up the Pistons last month and was in the running for the Heat.
“We have a business model that’s working really well for us ... in markets that we’re already doing business where we have typically an NBC, ABC, CBS or Fox station,” Scripps Sports President Brian Lawlor said. “We’re in 40-something markets. There’s still other NHL and other NBA markets that check that box, and we’ve gotten a lot of calls from other teams that aren’t in our in markets [where] we might own an ION but we don’t own like an ABC, NBC, CBS.”
However, just because Scripps doesn’t have a Big Four station in certain NBA or NHL markets looking for a solution doesn’t mean it can’t get one set up. “We’ve chosen not to yet,” Lawlor said. “We don’t have a news brand and a sales team and those relationships, and all of that is really important for us in being able to amplify and advance. But down the road — we’re clearly executing on sort of ‘Scripps Sports 1.0’ [right now] — maybe moving to 2.0 with some level of maturity that didn’t exist a couple years ago.”
Scripps does local game distribution for the Golden Knights (whose owner, Bill Foley, launched a bid for an NBA expansion team Monday afternoon), Mammoth, Predators, Lightning and Panthers. Lawlor said that, while many in the media and hockey business were cautious at first, those relationships have turned out to be fruitful.
“Our thesis that the teams were seeking reach and over-the-air broadcast could really dramatically extend their reach was spot on,” he said. “There were things that we believed early on that we got wrong, but we were able to then sort of tweak it and advance it. … We’ve opened up a lot of new sponsorship opportunities. … We’re able to just take a lot of those sponsors and sort of upsell them into sports, and then there’s a whole lot of other businesses that are not traditional advertisers but lean into sports.”
As the NBA and NHL both reportedly look to develop national solutions for local broadcasts, Lawlor, who said Scripps’ relationship with the NHL league office has been great, sees the company continuing to provide a crucial function.
“The NBA obviously floats it all the time that they want to consolidate their digital rights, but still be on linear or potentially down the road roll up on linear,” Lawlor said. “But we’ve proved in the NHL — these games on free, over-the-air television are really valuable and they reach a ton of fans, and that’s not going to be the case tucked behind a paywall.”
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