NEW YORK — Knicks owner James Dolan’s letter to the NBA’s Board of Governors spurred more transparency from the league to its owners regarding the money kept from the new media rights deal, the New York Daily News has learned.

Dolan criticized the 11-year, $76 billion deal in a memo on Monday, which ESPN was first to report.

Among the sharp criticisms in his letter, the Knicks governor noted the NBA planned to keep up to $6 billion, or 8%, of the deal for itself without “sufficient justification … nor transparency into how it arrived at the sum, how these fees will be allocated or to what extent the league will utilize this purported revenue growth to insure new and incremental costs and further expand the league’s ever growing expense level.”

As a result of the letter, the NBA sent a detailed breakdown to each of its owners, thoroughly explaining how the money kept is to be spent, the News has learned, which includes but is not limited to funds to strike deals with partners, the NBA International program and marketing efforts.

The Board of Governors voted 29-1 to approve the new media deal, with the Knicks as the only holdout, a source told the News, as first reported by the Sports Business Journal.

Dolan also wrote in his letter that the NBA planned to keep $15 million of the current media deal for the 2024-25 season, and then increase its share to $358 million for the 2025-26 season.

A league source told the News the NBA will keep $348 million for the 2025-26 season, $10 million less than indicated in Dolan’s letter, and said the NBA projects to keep $113 million in the 2024-25 season, not the $15 million indicated in the letter, marking an increase more in line with the overall value of the media deal.

The media rights deal is best defined as a series of contracts with different companies for the rights to air NBA games.

In a press conference Tuesday, NBA commissioner Adam Silver declined to disclose the winners of the hoops stream sweepstakes, but it has been reported that ESPN, NBC and Amazon Prime Video will emerge with deals to stream NBA games after the 2024-25 season.

The incumbent NBA media partner TNT has first right of refusal and a Monday deadline to match either Amazon’s $1.8 billion-per-year offer or NBC’s $2.5 billion-per-year offer, according to Front Office Sports.

The deal puts pressure on all 30 NBA franchises and their respective Regional Sports Networks (RSNs) to find a path toward sustainability, an outcome Dolan described as “unviable” in his letter to the Board of Governors on Monday.

MSG Network has experienced a 45% decline in subscribers over the last eight years, a source confirmed to the News. The MSG+ app charges $29.99 per month, $309 annually, or $9.99 per game. MSG Network is currently available to Verizon FiOS and Spectrum customers, but MSG was unable to come to an agreement to renew its contract with Comcast Xfinity in 2021.

MSG Network is also available to DIRECTV STREAM, Fubo TV, YouTube TV, Hulu + Live TV and Sling TV customers. As a result of the new media deal, which is set to loop in two new partners (Amazon and NBC) and potentially a fourth (a reported possible smaller media package for TNT), more Knicks games project to be aired nationally instead of locally with seemingly no compensation for the local network.

Dolan has long been a detractor of the NBA’s revenue-sharing policies, which pool revenue together from all 30 NBA franchises and distribute money from bigger-market, higher-earning teams like the Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers to smaller-market constituents across the league.

Already touting a steep decline in subscribers over nearly the last decade, Dolan wrote in his letter he worries the new media deal will render RSNs unviable, further hurting the bottom line for a Knicks team with a payroll — and subsequently, a luxury tax bill — set to balloon in pursuit of the franchise’s first NBA title in over 50 years.

“The proposal threatens to completely eliminate [RSNs] without a comparable replacement offered by the league and no articulated plans to address the production and distribution vacuum that the league will inevitably create in its quest to further disrupt the RSN industry,” Dolan wrote in his letter. “The inclusion of streaming partners in the proposal allows fans in all NBA markets to bypass their RSN to watch certain games in their local market. The proposal offers no local protections for RSNs.”

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