New Local Sports Channels: Watch NBA, NHL, and MLB Games Free With an Antenna

For twenty years the answer to "how do I watch my local team" was the same everywhere: you needed cable. Most teams' games were on a regional cable sports channel, like Bally Sports Florida, AT&T SportsNet Rocky Mountain, or NBC Sports Bay Area, and there was no way to get those channels with an antenna.

That model is falling apart, and something unexpected is replacing it. A growing number of NBA, NHL, and MLB teams have moved their games onto local broadcast stations, where you can watch them free over the air with an antenna and no subscription at all.

If you've noticed an unfamiliar sports channel turn up in your area, such as Peachtree Sports Network, Arizona's Family Sports, or the Gulf Coast Sports & Entertainment Network, that's what you're seeing. Nearly all of them launched in the last three years.

What actually happened

The company behind the Bally Sports channels filed for bankruptcy in 2023. It came out of bankruptcy under a new name but kept losing teams and shut the channels down for good in the spring of 2026. That left 13 NBA teams and seven NHL teams looking for a new TV home at the same time, which is why so many deals were announced this summer. Other cable sports channels, including the AT&T SportsNet channels, closed or were sold off in the same stretch.

The underlying problem is simple. A cable sports channel makes its money from a fee that's built into cable bills, and fewer people pay for cable every year. As that money shrinks, the channel can't pay teams what it promised, and the teams start looking for a new place to air their games.

The numbers are stark. About 105 million American homes paid for cable or satellite TV in 2010, and by 2025 it was under 69 million, fewer than the homes without it. The Bally Sports channels alone lost 22 million paying homes between 2019 and 2023. Younger viewers are the least likely to have cable at all: about three in four adults under 30 don't. And when YouTube TV and Hulu dropped those channels in 2020, even people paying for a streaming service often couldn't watch their local team.

Many teams found broadcast television, and so far it's working out well for everyone involved. Companies that own local TV stations, like Gray Media, Scripps, Tegna, Sinclair, Cox, and Nexstar, have been signing teams and putting the games on stations you can already receive.

• Fans are tuning in. In their first season on free TV, the Phoenix Suns' local viewership rose 69 percent and the Utah Jazz's rose 39 percent. Florida Panthers viewership grew another 51 percent in the team's second season on free TV.
• Teams are reaching more people. A team on free TV usually gets less in direct payments from the station than it did from cable (the Atlanta Hawks' new deal is reported to be about a third of their old one), but its games now reach every home in the area instead of only the ones still paying for cable. Teams are betting that the bigger audience pays off in other ways: more fans watching means more ticket sales, more merchandise, and sponsors willing to pay more to be seen. The teams that tried it first are signing up for more, with the Suns extending their deal through 2030 and the Mets and Diamondbacks renewing theirs.
• Local stations are getting noticed. Live games bring big audiences to channels that used to be easy to scroll past, which gives stations more viewers for their advertisers and gives people a reason to find their new sports channels.

The channels, and where they reach

Not everything described as a sports network is a channel you can tune to directly. Teams and TV companies have set these up in three different ways, and knowing which one your team uses tells you what to look for:

• A full-time sports channel. In this case, a TV company runs a sports channel around the clock, usually as a subchannel: an extra channel that comes in on a local station's signal, numbered something like 5.2 or 13.6. It carries live games when there are games, and sports shows, replays, and other programming the rest of the time. Gray Media's regional networks work this way.
• A regular local station. The games air on a station's main channel, in between its usual programming. The Spot stations, MY24 in Milwaukee, and KJZZ in Salt Lake City work this way.
• A name for a team's games. A team gives its games a network-style name and sends them to stations across its region, and each station airs them on its own channel. There's no channel with that name on it. The Kraken Hockey Network works this way.

Gray Media's regional sports channels

Gray owns local stations across much of the country, and since 2023 it has launched a regional sports channel in many of its markets. Each one is a full-time channel, usually on a subchannel of a Gray station, so the channel number depends on your city. These are the main ones:

Gray has launched smaller channels since, including Matrix Midwest in St. Louis, Midsouth Sports & Entertainment in Memphis, Golden Spike in Omaha, The Wax in Connecticut, Last Frontier in Alaska, and Rose City SportsNet in Portland.

The Spot

Scripps took a different approach. Instead of starting a new channel, it turned several of its existing stations into local sports stations under a single shared name, The Spot, and put each city's team on its own station. These are full stations on their main channel, not subchannels. The name is the same everywhere, but the programming is local: The Spot in Nashville carries the Predators and nothing from Florida, and The Spot in South Florida carries the Panthers and nothing from Tennessee.

Each one is identified by its channel number, so look for the name and the number together:

If your guide still shows the old name, that's normal. Several of these stations were Ion or CW stations until recently, and program guides have been slow to catch up. The underlying stations are WNPX 28 in Nashville, WXPX 66 in Tampa Bay, WSFL 39 and WHDT 9 in South Florida, KMCC 34 in Las Vegas, and KUPX 16 in Utah.

Detroit is the one Scripps market outside The Spot. Pistons games air on TV20 Detroit, with coverage produced alongside the market's ABC station.

Teams on individual stations

Elsewhere, teams have signed directly with a local station, and the games air on that station's regular channel:

The Kraken Hockey Network is the third kind described above, so don't expect to find a channel by that name. In Seattle the games air on KONG 16, with some also on KING 5, and elsewhere they air on partner stations in Spokane, Yakima, Portland, Eugene, Boise, Twin Falls, and across Alaska. Look for the game in your program guide rather than for a channel called Kraken Hockey Network.

Chicago Sports Network, home of the Bulls, Blackhawks, and White Sox, is one to cross off the list. It launched with an over-the-air signal in 2024 but dropped it in 2025, and it is now available only through cable, satellite, and streaming.

Which teams are on free TV now

Here's where each team's games air this season, sorted by sport. These deals change often, and some only last a year, so this list covers the 2026 baseball season and the 2026-27 basketball and hockey seasons.

NHL

Scripps has deals with five teams, all on The Spot stations in their areas:

• Nashville Predators: The Spot - Nashville 28, beginning this season
• Vegas Golden Knights: The Spot - Vegas 34
• Tampa Bay Lightning: The Spot - Tampa Bay 66
• Florida Panthers: The Spot - South Florida 39 and 9
• Utah Mammoth: The Spot - Utah 16

The Seattle Kraken put all of their local games on free TV when they launched the Kraken Hockey Network in 2024. Roughly 70 games a season air on KONG 16 in Seattle and on partner stations across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska.

Most of the other NHL teams that lost their cable home this year went a different way. The Blues, Blue Jackets, Hurricanes, and Wild now have their games produced by the league and streamed on Prime Video, with only a limited number expected on local stations.

NBA

This is where the most teams moved at once. When the Bally Sports channels shut down, 13 NBA teams needed a new TV home for 2026-27, and about half of them chose free TV. These teams are on local stations for the first time this season:

• Atlanta Hawks: Atlanta News First and Peachtree Sports Network, plus Gray stations across Georgia
• Charlotte Hornets: WSOC 9 and TV64, the team's first season on free TV in 27 years
• Detroit Pistons: TV20 Detroit, through Scripps Sports
• Miami Heat: Local 10, for every game not shown nationally
• Milwaukee Bucks: MY24, the first time all of the team's games have been on free TV in 31 years
• Orlando Magic: TV 27 in Orlando, plus stations in Tampa, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Tallahassee, and Panama City

Several teams made the move earlier and are staying put:

• New Orleans Pelicans: the Gulf Coast Sports & Entertainment Network, since 2024
• Phoenix Suns: Arizona's Family 3TV and Arizona's Family Sports, since 2023
• Utah Jazz: KJZZ 14, since 2023
• Dallas Mavericks: KFAA 29 and WFAA 8, since 2024
• Portland Trail Blazers: KATU and KUNP, since 2024

Not every team went this route. The Cavaliers, Pacers, Timberwolves, and Spurs moved their games to the DAZN streaming service, with some games free, and the Thunder put 10 games on local stations and the rest on a streaming service. The NBA is also expected to start handling local TV for its teams itself in 2027-28, so many of this season's deals only last one year and could change again next fall.

MLB

Baseball has moved the least, because 162 games is a lot of airtime for a station that also runs news and network programming. Most teams have kept their games on cable or streaming and put some of them on local stations instead. In 2026:

• New York Mets: 25 games on PIX11
• Arizona Diamondbacks: 11 games on 12 News
• St. Louis Cardinals: 10 games on KMOV and Matrix Midwest
• Chicago White Sox: 10 games on WCIU
• Detroit Tigers: 10 games on FOX 2 Detroit, plus stations in Grand Rapids, Flint, Lansing, Marquette, and Toledo
• Cincinnati Reds: 10 games on FOX19, plus Gray stations across the region
• Minnesota Twins: 10 games on FOX 9
• Philadelphia Phillies: select games on NBC10

So in baseball this is a partial answer rather than a full one. It's still a meaningful change from a few years ago, when the number of local games on free television in most markets was zero.

How to check whether your team is one of them

Because this changes every offseason, the reliable move is to check rather than rely on any list, including this one.

1. Look at your team's official site. Every club posts a "broadcast" or "how to watch" page naming its local TV home for the season. That's the authoritative answer.
2. Note the station or network name, then find out whether it's a broadcast station or a cable channel. If it's something like Peachtree Sports Network, Arizona's Family Sports, The Spot, or a plain channel number, it's broadcast and you can get it with an antenna. If it's Chicago Sports Network, MASN, NESN, YES, or a streaming service such as DAZN or Prime Video, it isn't.
3. Rescan your television. This is the step people skip. Many of these channels launched in the last three years, and a TV that hasn't been rescanned since then won't have them in its channel list at all.

Why you may not have the channel yet

Two things trip people up.

Gray's channels live on subchannels. Gray puts its regional sports channels on subchannels of its local stations, with numbers like 5.2 or 13.6. Those come in on the same signal as the main channel but only show up after a channel scan. Our post on how one signal carries many channels explains how that works.

The names are unfamiliar. Peachtree Sports Network, Rock Entertainment Sports Network, and Palmetto Sports & Entertainment don't sound like channels you grew up with, because almost none of them existed before 2023. If you're scanning a channel list for something recognizable, you'll skip right past them.

What this means if you've cut the cord

It's the most encouraging development in over-the-air television in years, and it runs against the general direction of sports on TV.

Almost everything else has been moving the other way, with big national games moving to Prime Video, Netflix, Peacock, and ESPN's streaming service. Local games are the one place where free TV is gaining ground. A local TV station makes its money from ads, so it wants the biggest audience possible, and that works better for a team than a cable channel that keeps losing subscribers.

The practical upshot: an antenna is worth more for local sports today than it was five years ago, and in a growing number of markets it now covers a full NBA or NHL season.

Find the stations in your area

Search your city or zip code to see every station broadcasting near you, including the subchannels these networks tend to live on:

If a station you're expecting doesn't appear, it's usually reception rather than availability. Our indoor versus outdoor antenna guide covers how to fix that, and subchannels are often the first thing to drop out when a signal is marginal. Our post on weather and digital TV explains why.

For the national picture on each sport, see our schedules for the NFL, MLB, college football, and NASCAR.

Sources

• Awful Announcing on the former Bally Sports channels shutting down and the 13 NBA teams they left without a TV home.
• Next TV on the Bally Sports bankruptcy, including how many paying homes the channels lost.
• Adwave's cord-cutting statistics on how many homes still pay for cable, and CivicScience on young adults without cable.
• Awful Announcing on local NBA ratings rising after teams moved to free TV, and the Panthers on their second-season viewership growth.
• Wikipedia's list of Gray Media's broadcast sports networks, and TVREV on how Gray built them.
• Scripps Sports on its NHL portfolio and the Predators agreement.
• TVNewsCheck on the Pistons returning to free over-the-air television.
• Wikipedia on the Kraken Hockey Network and its partner stations.
• The Chicago Sun-Times on Chicago Sports Network giving up its over-the-air signal.
• Sports Media Watch's guide to MLB local broadcasts, the most complete team-by-team breakdown published anywhere.
• Awful Announcing on whether local over-the-air networks are the future of regional sports.
• Wikipedia's list of cable sports channels, which tracks the status of each one in the country.