Trail Blazers Parting Ways With ROOT Sports: What it Means

The Blazers' widely maligned broadcast partner will be replaced with an over-the-air network to be announced.

In late April, the Seattle Kraken announced that they were ending their broadcast partnership with ROOT Sports Northwest early and moving to an over-the-air model to make their games more accessible to fans.

Now, the Trail Blazers are doing the same.

With one year remaining on the agreement they signed in 2021, the Blazers are parting ways with the much-maligned ROOT, effective immediately.

"Trail Blazers basketball will no longer air on ROOT Sports, but we thank ROOT Sports for years of great partnership,” the team said in a statement on Wednesday afternoon. “An exciting announcement on the future television home of Blazers basketball will be made soon."

According to sources with knowledge of the team’s plans, they will be moving games to an over-the-air partner to be determined.

What does this mean?

Well, most importantly, the Blazers’ games are likely going to be a lot easier to watch.

As the regional sports network (RSN) business deteriorates, other NBA teams have made the same move. The Suns just wrapped up their first season broadcasting over the air after ditching Bally Sports Arizona. Their local TV ratings nearly doubled from the previous year with their games being more accessible. Last week, my friend Christian Clark broke the news that the Pelicans are also breaking up with their Diamond-owned RSN as that company faces continued bankruptcy issues, and going over-the-air.

The bet that all of these teams are making is that, despite giving up the guaranteed rights fees that RSN partners pay to broadcast their games, it’s a better move in the long run to have their games be available to watch for free to as many people as possible, creating more interest in the team—and more potential future customers interested in paying for tickets and merchandise.

Another team that has made this move in recent years is the Utah Jazz, who also introduced the Jazz+ streaming service available in the Salt Lake City area for $125 per season. It’s possible the Blazers could look to create something like this in the future.

Since the Blazers left the now-defunct NBC Sports Northwest for ROOT before the 2021-22 season, they have faced widespread complaints from fans about the channel not being available on many of the popular streaming alternatives to cable, including YouTube TV, Hulu and Sling. The only providers that carry ROOT are Comcast, DirecTV and FuboTV. It was also briefly offered as part of a short-lived streaming alternative called Evoca that went out of business in December of 2022.

That already made games hard enough to watch for fans that didn’t have cable or Fubo. But days before the start of last season, Comcast made it even tougher by moving ROOT Sports up a tier to be available exclusively in their “Ultimate” package of channels, which cost upwards of $20 per month more than the “Popular” package that previously carried it. This priced out many fans who either couldn’t afford to or didn’t want to pay significantly more to watch a 21-win team in the beginning stages of a rebuild after trading Damian Lillard last offseason.

The Blazers’ record last season didn’t help things, but the lack of accessibility for ROOT Sports—made considerably worse by Comcast’s last-minute rug pull—was by far the biggest driver of the team’s 49 percent drop in local TV ratings from the 2022-23 season.

Also not helping: many times during last season, Blazers games would be bumped from the main ROOT Sports channel to the harder-to-find ROOT Sports Plus. Sometimes it would be for a Kraken game happening in the same time window; other times, they would be moved in favor of reruns of Kraken or Mariners studio programming.

For those who were able to watch the games, ROOT was plagued by frequent technical issues and poor broadcast quality. All of the potential over-the-air partners have much stronger infrastructures in place and will be able to show Blazers games at full quality.

Because the Blazers own and produce their own game broadcasts, the on-air product will be completely unaffected by the change in partners. Their on-camera talent—play-by-play announcer Kevin Calabro, color analyst Lamar Hurd, sideline reporter Brooke Olzendam and other contributors such as Tom Haberstroh, Michael Holton and Neil Everett—and behind-the-scenes production staff are all employees of the team, not of ROOT Sports.

Under their agreement, as it was under NBC Sports Northwest before them, ROOT paid the team a set amount of money per year for the inventory of games, while the Blazers were responsible for producing the game broadcasts and selling advertising on them. That will continue to be the case for the team’s new partner.

Going into the start of last season, the Mariners owned 71 percent of ROOT Sports Northwest, with the rest being owned by Warner Brothers Discovery. But as WBD navigated the changing sports-rights landscape and their own tenuous financial situation (unless they win a pending lawsuit, they’re about to lose the NBA with NBC and Amazon coming in after this season), they opted to get out of the RSN business entirely. In December of 2023, the Mariners bought out Warner’s 29 percent stake and now control the channel entirely.

Between Warner pulling out of the network and the Kraken walking away, the Mariners are set to lose significant money on ROOT Sports, which will continue to broadcast their games at least through the current baseball season. With the Blazers now joining the Kraken in parting ways, it remains to be seen whether ROOT will continue to exist beyond that.

That’s no longer the Trail Blazers’ problem.