The NHL’s current TV package with ESPN and TNT is $4.5 billion over seven years, and the league reportedly wants 50 to 100 percent more when it renews. That is the number making the rounds after Awful Announcing relayed CNBC’s Alex Sherman: the NHL is preparing to open an early negotiating window with ESPN and TNT’s new parent, Skydance, and it is not planning to ask politely.
Both sides reportedly show “mutual interest” in staying together. That part is the easy sell. The hard part is what a doubling actually means.
How big is a 50-100% raise on $4.5 billion?
Start with the thing most headlines skip. The $4.5 billion is the total for the whole seven-year deal, which runs through the 2027-28 season. It is not the annual figure.
Spread across seven years, that works out to roughly $640 million a year. A 50 percent raise lands near $960 million a year, and a 100 percent raise lands near $1.3 billion. If a renewal ran another seven years, the total would sit somewhere around $6.75 billion to $9 billion. All of that is rough arithmetic on the reported numbers, not a reported contract figure, and nobody has said how long the next deal would be.
So the ask is real money. It is also not a number that breaks a company the size of Disney or Skydance on its own.
Why does the NBA’s $77 billion deal not transfer?
The NHL will reportedly point to the NBA’s 11-year, $77 billion agreement, which comes to about $7 billion a year. Put $640 million next to $7 billion and you have a league asking for a raise while sitting at roughly a tenth of the benchmark it is citing.
I think that comparison is doing more work as a negotiating prop than as an argument. The NBA sells a different sport, to a different audience, with a different star economy. A hockey rights fee that grows 50 percent is a hockey story. It does not become an NBA story because someone put both numbers in one paragraph.
The NHL does have a real card, though. Ratings are up this season on both networks. TNT’s own PR account says the NHL on TNT is off to its best start ever, with average audience up 42 percent across TNT, truTV and HBO Max compared with 2025.
https://x.com/TNTSportsPR/status/2116297264607965392
That is TNT talking about its own numbers, so treat it as a sales pitch with a real data point inside it. Still, a network that is proud of those numbers has a hard time arguing the product is shrinking.
What does the NFL have to do with hockey’s TV money?
Here is the quiet variable. The NFL wanted new deals done early, before its opt-out after the 2029 season, but those talks have stalled and the league appears set to wait. Sports Media Watch reported in July that Gary Bettman told CNBC at Sun Valley the NHL does not feel time pressure to finish before the NFL does.
My read, and it is only a read: the NFL’s pause could matter for hockey in two opposite ways. If the networks are holding their powder for a giant football bill, every other rights fee looks like a cost to be squeezed. If football slips a few years, some of that budget could sit free for something else. Which way it breaks depends on choices nobody has made yet.
The mid-merger angle matters too. David Ellison has said Skydance will be “disciplined” on sports rights, and TNT Sports is joining forces with CBS Sports under the same roof. A company combining two sports operations has a reason to pay for hockey only if it wants hockey as a fixed cost. I would not claim to know who holds the leverage here. Both sides have a case, and it will be clearer once the window opens.
So is the ask too big?
An ask is an opening bid. A reported 50 to 100 percent range tells you where the NHL wants the conversation to start, and the range itself is wide enough that the league has plenty of room to land lower and still call it a win. The number to watch is not the headline percentage. It is how many years the next deal runs and whether the NFL moves first.
If I had to pick, I would bet on a real raise and a smaller one than the top of that range. Ratings are up, both networks want to stay, and the league does not feel rushed. Those are the ingredients of a solid renewal, not a doubling.
