NBA on TBS
television series
The NBA on TBS is an American presentation of National Basketball Association (NBA) regular season and playoff game telecasts that aired on the American cable and satellite network TBS from October 10, 1984, to May 14, 2002. The games were produced by Turner Sports, the sports division of the Turner Broadcasting System subsidiary of Time Warner, TBS's corporate parent.
TBS obtained rights to air NBA games beginning with the 1984–85 season (replacing the ESPN and USA Network as the NBA's national cable partners) in which TBS shared the NBA television package along with CBS. The 1989–90 season then saw Turner start to split the NBA cable package between TBS and TNT. TBS then lost its portion of the cable package to ESPN prior to the start of the 2002–03 season, with TNT following suit and losing their rights to NBC and Amazon prior to the start of the 2025–26 season.
Coverage
Atlanta Hawks
For many years beginning when the station assumed rights to the team's game telecasts in the late 1970s, WTBS (channel 17) in Atlanta – which served as the originating feed of the national TBS cable channel from December 1976 to October 2007 – aired some regular season games from the Atlanta Hawks (which was also owned by Ted Turner at the time), which also aired nationally on WTBS's superstation feed; TBS aired the games nationwide until the telecasts became subjected to NBA blackout restrictions within 35 miles of the home team's arena, resulting in many Hawks away games televised by the network being unavailable to cable providers within the designated market area of the opposing team (this restriction was dropped when TNT gained the right to be the exclusive broadcaster of any game that it chose to carry).
National coverage
When it began to televise games from NBA teams other than the Hawks beginning with the 1984–85 season, TBS maintained a package of approximately 55 regular season NBA games annually on Tuesday and Friday nights. TBS also carried numerous NBA Playoff games as well as the NBA draft from 1985–1989.
Playoff coverage
TBS was also allowed to televise 20 early round conference playoff games beginning with the 1985 NBA playoffs. In 1986, TBS (as well as CBS) did not carry Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals, relegating the broadcast of that game to television stations in the team's designated market areas; this would be the last time that an NBA Conference Finals game was not televised on a national network. During the 1989 NBA playoffs, only 13 of the 24 games (comprising Games 1–3 of each series) in the first round aired on TBS or CBS. For example, none of the four games from the Seattle-Houston first round series appeared on national television.
All-Star Weekend
Beginning in 1986, TBS televised the various contests from the NBA All-Star Weekend.
“NBA on TBS” enters the record as television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what television and series can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“NBA on TBS” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, television and series provides the most credible route into that argument.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6952718. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1984, 2002, 1989 and 2025.
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This entry incorporates text from “NBA on TBS” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.