Why a new NBA deal could mean cuts to your favorite NBC and Peacock shows

The NBA is close to a series of rights deals that will generate an astonishing $76 billion over 11 years for the sports league.

If you like watching basketball, this will likely mean some change: Right now, national NBA rights are split between Disney's ESPN/ABC and Warner Bros. Discovery's TNT; in the future, those will likely be split between Disney, Amazon, and Comcast, which intends to show some games on NBC and some on its Peacock streaming service. So you may need to sign up for some new streamers (just like NFL fans have had to do).

But what if you don't care about basketball? Well, you may be in for some change, too: The Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast would be making programming changes to accommodate, and pay for, the new sports deal, which is estimated to cost $2.5 billion a year:

Comcast declined to comment.

On the one hand, this makes plenty of sense: Live sports is perhaps the only thing that can reliably generate a TV audience these days (though the NBA is most definitely not the NFL). So why not spend money on that, and take some of it from programming that is less effective?

On the other hand: This has real echoes of the old TV model that lots of people said they hated — the one where people who didn't care about sports ended up paying for sports anyway because the one-sized-fits-all pay-TV cable bundle made them pay for ESPN and other sports programming.

The best-case scenario here for non-sports fans is that the addition of the NBA helps them, too: Maybe so many more people will watch NBC and Peacock that those services grow and generate more revenue, and more programming, and non-sports fans will get more stuff they like, too.

Maybe! But in the near term, the calculus is clear: If you're spending $2.5 billion on sports, you need to find $2.5 billion (or at least a very big number) of resources somewhere else. And if those resources happen to include your favorite shows, you're out of luck.