MLK Day will provide the perfect opportunity for the international audience to get the full NBA whip-around treatment in primetime.
Ever spend a night on your couch watching NBA games and wish there was an NFL Red Zone-like experience to take you through the most important and exciting action of the night in real time?
On Monday in 84 countries, including Canada, Germany, England, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Israel, the NBA will offer its sixth-ever edition of NBA 360 for its slate of six games on Martin Luther King Day, which play out in primetime in Europe and the Middle East. There will be five hours of continuous and simultaneous broadcasts of six games: New Orleans at Boston, Charlotte at New York, Philadelphia at Washington, Brooklyn at Cleveland, Chicago at Memphis and Indiana at the L.A. Clippers.
Subscribe for the biggest stories in the business of sports and entertainment, daily.
The NBA 360 experience, which was first tried out during the 2018-19 season, features live look-ins as part of the whip-around coverage you’re used to seeing on NFL Sundays with in-progress highlights, featuring the biggest dunks, threes, triple-doubles and buzzer-beaters, along with graphics showing box scores, standings and milestones. 30 international broadcast partners are on board, and they’ll have the option to add their own local broadcasters to comment and analyze the action in their respective native languages.
“NBA 360 offers international fans a unique way to enjoy simultaneous and continuous coverage of multiple NBA games,” said Matt Brabants, the NBA’s head of international content partnerships. “We’re fortunate to be working with great broadcast partners around the world that will deliver the innovative coverage to our passionate fans in Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.”
NBA 360, which was most recently broadcast on this season’s first Friday night on Oct. 22, will be produced in Toronto by NBA Entertainment and MLSE/NBA TV Canada.
“NBA 360 allows us to maximize the advantageous time difference of teams playing on MLK Day, providing fans with wall-to-wall coverage of their favorite teams and players,” said Elsa Memmi, the NBA’s Europe and Middle East Vice President. “This year sees a record 30 partners from over 40 EME countries and territories participate in NBA 360, allowing fans to catch 26 European players in action on this special night.”
As to whether we’ll ever see this type of product in the United States, the league said it’s always looking for new and innovative ways to deliver NBA games and programming to fans and is evaluating what resonates best in different parts of the world. Perhaps one day, like the lucky fans outside the U.S. this Monday, we’ll get to see a Red Zone equivalent finally come to the NBA.
