RandBall: The Twins have transformed their local TV broadcasts. Are the Wolves next?

I’ve spent countless hours and space here lamenting then predicting and then mostly lauding the Twins’ TV situation as it slowly transformed from a shrinking footprint to a much wider offering that finally, in 2025, features a direct-to-consumer streaming option for $19.99 a month or $99 a season in addition to traditional cable and satellite packages.

As someone who ditched cable several years ago for a smaller package of channels that used to include Twins games but hasn’t for a few years, I bought the package and have found myself far more engaged with this team than previous iterations (though, regrettably for Twins fans, there hasn’t been much to cheer about during a wobbly 3-7 start).

The Twins’ transformation meant cutting the cord, so to speak, with FanDuel Sports North (previously Bally Sports North and Fox Sports North) while letting Major League Baseball run its broadcasts and distribution.

There is short-term financial pain because the Twins’ TV contract as recently as 2023 paid them nearly $55 million and the new arrangement, while financial specifics are not known, does not approach that figure.

The hope is that there will be long-term gain in both engagement and eventually revenue, particularly as MLB hopefully moves to a model where local broadcasts are brought under one umbrella and revenue is shared equally between teams. That is a goal Rob Manfred has spoken of frequently, and it is essential in shoring up the sport’s economic gap between the haves and have-nots.

How and when baseball achieves that is unknown, but the Twins are on board with the new model.

A recent report lets us ask another question about a different local team: How long will it be until the NBA and the Timberwolves make the same move?

The short answer is that it likely won’t be the 2025-26 season. Sports Business Journal reported recently that the Wolves are one of four NBA teams that are “almost certainly” going to extend their contract with FanDuel Sports for at least next season.

The Wolves get $24 million in rights fees from the RSN, according to Sports Business Journal — many millions more than the handful of teams who have switched to an over-the-air model are generating.

Going that route for next season would be difficult and less lucrative for the Wolves and other teams that are still on FanDuel. The Wolves also don’t have the same problem as the Twins did because FanDuel offers a direct-to-consumer subscription for the same $20 a month as the Twins’ MLB subscription.

So people without cable or satellite can pay for access to the Wolves, Wild, Lynx and others — an option that was previously not available for Twins games on FanDuel because they did not have streaming rights.

But in the not-too-distant future, the Wolves and the rest of the NBA figure to end up as part of an NBA streaming package that bundles all the local rights. The NBA reportedly is negotiating with several big players, including Amazon, YouTube and Apple, for those rights but no deal is imminent.

The best guess, then, is that the Wolves remain on FanDuel as long as it it makes more financial sense until the NBA secures that national deal.

But that might not be more than a year or two, and the Wolves’ TV transformation could be just behind that of the Twins.