Around 4 p.m. on Wednesday, the NBA’s media and distribution executive Bill Koenig emailed Warner Bros. Discovery’s Luis Silberwasser to explain exactly why the league wouldn’t allow WBD to use its matching rights for a package of league games that Amazon had successfully bid on. Presumably, of course, WBD C.E.O. David Zaslav and his attorneys were fully prepared for this eventuality. A half-hour later, as the NBA sent out a statement announcing its $77 billion worth of new, 11-year media deals with ESPN, NBCUniversal, and Amazon, WBD’s lawyers were already drafting the lawsuit that the company plans to file against the league, possibly as soon as tomorrow.

The mushrooming legal showdown is, in many ways, the culmination of a subtle breakdown in relations—missed signals, bad communication, frustrated dealmaking, and a couple negotiating misplays—that was, in retrospect, long in the making. Years before negotiations had started in earnest, ESPN and WBD executives had indicated during private conversations that they both wanted to renew their deals with the NBA. And NBA executives reciprocated the fealty… because, well, who wouldn’t want to renew a deal with a long-term partner? After all, WBD’s TNT had been carrying NBA games since the ’80s.