The Atlanta Hawks have an answer to the question hanging over their broadcast future: the team has reached an agreement with Gray Media to carry its non-nationally televised games in 2026-27 on WANF — the local station branded Atlanta News First — and Peachtree Sports Network, per Lauren Williams and Rodney Ho of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The Hawks had been in the market for a new local partner since Main Street Sports Group, the company that operated FanDuel Sports Network, shut down. That collapse left a large share of the team’s local inventory without a home and made the Hawks one of several teams forced to rebuild their local media setup on the fly this summer.
Landing on a broadcast station matters more than the corporate names involved. Regional sports networks sat behind cable and satellite subscriptions that fewer households keep every year; WANF is free over-the-air television. The practical effect is that a Hawks game will reach any Atlanta household with an antenna, no subscription required, at the exact moment the franchise needs casual fans to form habits around a young roster. Milwaukee made a similar move to free local TV this offseason, and the league’s broader drift away from the RSN model now looks less like triage and more like strategy.
The highlight-reel moment here isn’t a clip — it’s distribution. A team that wants its young core to become appointment viewing just removed the paywall between those players and the city, one season before most of them hit restricted free agency conversations. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed in the AJC’s report.
The fantasy angle is modest but real: wider legal access to Hawks games makes it easier to actually scout the rotation battles that matter in drafts — how the frontcourt minutes shake out while Mouhamed Gueye recovers from foot surgery chief among them. Nothing about the deal changes any player’s projection.
