Carolina Hurricanes watching Bally Sports South bankruptcy closely after ACC drop
The hunt for ACC football and men’s basketball games on “RSN” will soon be over, much to the relief of cord-cutters and fans across the ACC who couldn’t find them on their local regional sports network alike. With the bankrupt parent company of Bally Sports walking away from the package of ACC games it bought from Raycom, those games will inevitably end up back in the hands of ESPN and the ACC Network.
This is good news for the ACC, which won’t get any additional money out of the deal but will finally bring the entire ACC broadcast package under one umbrella. That’s been a priority for Jim Phillips since he took over as commissioner: A year ago, the ACC bought back the rights to the baseball and women’s basketball tournaments from Bally/Raycom to ensure they were broadcast throughout the footprint. The numbers didn’t work on the football and men’s basketball games then. They do now.
What does it mean, however, for the Carolina Hurricanes, who are still a full broadcast partner of Bally Sports South — the former Fox Sports South, which has carried the Hurricanes since their arrival — if the network is willing to walk away from the ACC?
Diamond Sports Group, which bought the package of regional sports networks that includes Bally Sports South in 2019, declared bankruptcy in March. Since then, it has dropped rights deals that it considers no longer financially viable and asked in court, unsuccessfully, to make reduced payments in others.
“We’re relying on the league to continue to give us updates,” Hurricanes president and general manager Don Waddell said. “It’s always a concern when a company’s in bankruptcy. As you know, in bankruptcy, they already shed one team and they have proceedings coming up. We’re hopeful Bally Sports South survives the whole thing, but you never know.”
Waddell said the Hurricanes and Bally signed a six-year extension last spring, but as Diamond has shown with the ACC, it’s willing to drop anything. Last fall, as Diamond approached bankruptcy, MLB, the NHL and NBA even looked into buying the networks outright. The Hurricanes are one of 12 NHL teams with broadcast deals with Diamond affiliates.
The biggest issues have been with MLB teams, since the league controls the streaming rights for those games, making them less useful to Diamond. Facing the possibility of deals ending abruptly overnight, MLB put the infrastructure in place before this season to take over and distribute television broadcasts of any of its teams immediately.
That’s already happened once: Last month, Diamond refused to make a scheduled rights payment to the San Diego Padres. A day later, the Padres and MLB carried on as if Bally Sports San Diego never existed.
“As with the Padres, MLB will stand ready to make games available to fans if Diamond fails to meet its obligations,” the league said in a statement.
In the case of Bally Sports South, a strong, apparently profitable deal to carry the Atlanta Braves should continue to make the network a viable property, in addition to its deals with the Hurricanes and Charlotte Hornets, Atlanta Hawks, Memphis Grizzlies and Nashville Predators.
If not, the Hurricanes have explored preliminary contingency plans, although the NHL doesn’t have the league-wide broadcast infrastructure in place as MLB. Broadcasters like Mike Maniscalco and Tripp Tracy are employed by the team, not Bally, although both of their contracts are up July 1.
“We talked about this last year when there was some talk (Bally) might not be here,” Waddell said. “We think we can get up and running if something happened. It’s not ideal.”
For now, it’s business as usual for the Hurricanes and Bally Sports South. But as Diamond has shown with the ACC, one filing in bankruptcy court can change everything.
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This story was originally published June 16, 2023 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Carolina Hurricanes watching Bally Sports South bankruptcy closely after ACC drop."
