A severely punished Clippers team is also facing a reduced television profile during the upcoming 2026–27 season as it grapples with declining competitive prospects and media industry upheaval.
The NBA levied a historic set of penalties on the Clippers late Wednesday for circumventing the salary cap with star forward Kawhi Leonard. The sanctions include the removal of five first-round draft picks, a $30 million fine, and suspensions for owner Steve Ballmer and other senior team executives. Television-related matters were not directly part of the punishments, but the Clippers will likely be much harder to watch during the forthcoming season.
Locally, the Clippers have not yet disclosed their broadcast plans for the 2026–27 campaign. The team is among those previously tied to Main Street Sports Group, the shuttering regional sports network operator that stopped airing live games with the conclusion of the first round of last season’s NHL playoffs.
With the new NBA season quickly approaching, several other teams that had been with Main Street Sports have finalized alternate broadcast plans. In many instances, that new path has included London-based DAZN, which announced a deal with the Magic on Thursday, adding to recent agreements with the Cavaliers, Pacers, Spurs, and Timberwolves; it also signed a Gotham Sports pact that brings in the defending champion Knicks and Nets.
The Clippers did not finalize their local media plans last year until just before the season started, and if a similar pattern unfolds again, it could still be more than a month before the 2026–27 local broadcast schedule is announced.
Before the NBA sanctions in the Leonard case arrived, the team had been expected to renew an over-the-air agreement with the Nexstar-owned KTLA-TV and was also considering forming its own media network. The Clippers could also revive their former ClippersVision direct-to-consumer service that ran for three years before folding last year into Main Street Sports’ local streaming of the team’s games.
National Plans
On a national level, the Clippers are not a sizable factor in the league’s broadcast plans with Amazon, ESPN, and NBC Sports. The upcoming schedule includes just eight national TV appearances, tied for 19th highest in the NBA, and down by nearly two-thirds from the Clippers’ 21 national games during the 2025–26 season.
The Clippers’ set of national games includes four broadcasts on NBC, two on ESPN, and one each on Amazon and Peacock. Just two of the eight national games are before Christmas, six of them are on weekdays, and three are in the final six weeks of the season. It’s also quite possible that the overall number changes as the season goes on due to the NBA’s flex scheduling rules.
Aside from the Leonard-related drama, the massive reduction in airtime is hardly surprising. The Clippers were quickly eliminated in the NBA Play-In Tournament last season, and as a result, missed the postseason for the first time in four years. Already in the midst of a large-scale rebuilding effort, now further complicated by the stripped draft picks, the Clippers are tied with five other teams with the longest odds to win the 2027 NBA Finals.
Along with the Bucks, Bulls, Grizzlies, Kings, and Nets, the Clippers have an implied probability of just 0.1% to win the championship. The novelty of the next-generation Intuit Dome, which opened in 2024, has also lessened.
