- This wiki focuses on ABS-CBN's airing of the NBA games.
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a professional basketball league in North America composed of 30 teams (29 in the United States and 1 in Canada). It is one of the major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada and is considered the premier professional basketball league in the world. The league was founded in New York City on June 6, 1946, as the Basketball Association of America (BAA). It changed its name to the National Basketball Association on August 3, 1949, after merging with the competing National Basketball League (NBL). In 1976, the NBA and the American Basketball Association (ABA) merged, adding four franchises to the NBA. The NBA's regular season runs from October to April, with each team playing 82 games.
In the Philippines, the league has it's contract with a cable television and content provider company Solar Entertainment Corporation from the 2000's to 2019, and airs on it's cable channels: Solar Sports, Basketball TV and NBA Premium TV. On February 11, 2011, Solar partnered with ABS-CBN Corporation to air NBA games over free TV starting February 19, 2011. The games are aired on ABS-CBN and Studio 23/S+A under the branding NBA on ABS-CBN and NBA on Studio 23/ABS-CBN Sports and Action/S+A, respectively. ABS-CBN Sports also produced the Filipino language commentary of it for select games (such as Saturday games (under the NBA SabaDOS branding), Playoffs or Finals) airing on ABS-CBN.
Starting from the 2017 NBA Finals, the Finals were aired live without any delays in a bi-lingual simulcast, with a local Filipino commentary on ABS-CBN, and the original English commentary on S+A. As a result, Magandang Buhay would be either pre-empted or shortened during the said days, with Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals being the first game to cause pre-emptions for the said program.
The 2018-19 NBA season was the last season aired on ABS-CBN and S+A, as Solar's contract with the NBA had expired on mid-2019, thus not only the cessation of Solar's Basketball TV and NBA Premium TV, but also affecting ABS-CBN for the free TV coverage of the game before the 2019-20 season.
After losing the rights, Cignal/MediaQuest/One Sports eventually acquired the NBA rights at the start of the 2020 Bubble, terminating their NFL broadcasting rights with 1 year left after ABS-CBN's franchise was denied, following the closure of their sports division. Prior to this, CNN Philippines temporarily aired the league's games on weekends or holidays.
