One of basketball’s biggest commercial opportunities, according to Andrew Perlmutter, is everything that happens when the game isn’t being played. As CEO of NBAT2 Media, a joint venture between the NBA and video game holding company Take-Two Interactive, launched publicly in mid-2025, he is building a social entertainment business around off-court basketball culture as the entry point for an audience that may never follow the sport directly.
Andrew’s path to the role runs through digital media construction. He built Quartz for The Atlantic and STAT News for the Boston Globe, two digital publications designed to serve specific audiences within legacy media institutions. His basketball credentials are personal: he played in college and describes the 1990s NBA as the force that shaped what he wore and listened to.
“Basketball culture is very interwoven in hip hop culture,” he notes. “Basketball isn’t really a sport. It’s an all-encompassing way of life.” That framing became the operating thesis for NBAT2, which scaled its original programming through late 2025.
Based in New York, the company operates across three areas: social content through its branded handles, a participatory 2K gaming platform, and live events. Its programming includes “NOMAD,” a long-form travel series anchored by former NBA player Joakim Noah on YouTube, and “Is It Fashionable or Is He Just Tall?”, a short-form fashion series. The company’s 2K tournament platform, which lets users affiliate with NBA teams and compete on a leaderboard, has drawn 125,000 registered participants, according to Andrew. Sponsorship is the primary revenue driver today, with AT&T, CeraVe, and SoFi among its current brand partners.
Off-Court Culture Is the Larger Audience
NBAT2’s market thesis rests on two related observations. First, live sports remain one of the few remaining forms of shared culture at scale. “Sports are one of the last categories of shared culture that millions and millions of people can tap into,” Andrew says. Second, the culture generated by the NBA extends well beyond fans who follow the on-court product, into fashion, music, celebrity, and gaming.
Reaching those adjacent audiences requires content that does not demand basketball literacy. “The NBA is deeply connected to fashion,” Andrew notes. “The tunnel where people walk into the game is like the new runway.” That sensibility has a dedicated home in NBA R&D, NBAT2’s short-form handle, which frames itself as the league’s unofficial research and development department. The format applies the conventions of experiments and performance indexes to pop culture questions about basketball, what Andrew describes as a “somewhat comedic” premise designed to reach audiences who do not follow the sport.
“Is It Fashionable or Is He Just Tall?” is one such experiment: an NBA player’s tunnel outfit is placed next to the same look on a 5-foot-8 team staffer, and the result is a fashion verdict accessible to viewers with no interest in basketball.
A short-form series called the “Baddie Performance Index,” examining whether NBA players perform better with attractive celebrities courtside, reached beyond sports audiences on similar terms. “As long as you cared about celebrity culture, it was of interest to you,” Andrew says. He adds that the experiment found “when a beautiful female celebrity is courtside, the NBA players perform better.”
Content as Experiment, Not Commission
NBAT2 organizes its social presence around distinct editorial identities. NBA R&D, its short-form handle, is positioned internally as “the unofficial R&D department of the NBA,” running experiments on internet culture topics. Each handle has a defined voice, and new programming ideas are evaluated against that identity before production begins.
The feedback mechanism is direct. Platform data tells the team whether a piece of content generated engagement and community. “If we learn that something’s working, we’ll do more of it,” Andrew says. “If we learn that something isn’t working, we’ll either make adjustments or try the next thing.” The process borrows from product iteration more than from television commissioning.
“NOMAD” operates at the other end of the format spectrum: a long-form YouTube series in which Noah explores global communities through basketball as the connective thread, representing a parallel to Anthony Bourdain’s food-based format with a different lens. “Basketball is how Joakim connects with people around the world,” Andrew says, with Noah approaching the series more like a creator than a traditional on-screen personality.
Gaming as the Participation Layer
The joint venture Andrew took over was focused on elite-level e-sports: the most skilled 2K players competing against each other. Six months in, he concluded there was a bigger opportunity beyond elite e-sports.
2K draws roughly 30 million players annually, Andrew notes. Most of them want to win, but what drives their engagement is the cultural conversation around basketball. “What they care about is to discuss and enjoy the culture around basketball,” he says. That realization reoriented the gaming product away from elite competition and toward a participatory format open to any player.
The current platform lets any 2K user affiliate with a preferred NBA team, earn leaderboard points through matches, and work toward tournament play alongside NBA professionals. The model, according to Andrew, generates ongoing engagement rather than one-time spectator events and, he adds, could eventually create opportunities for e-commerce and affiliate marketing activity.
Creators Enter on Audience Terms
NBAT2 integrates creators according to what Andrew describes as an audience-alignment test: a creator’s following must overlap with NBAT2’s target audience, and the personality must fit organically rather than require adjustment. Working out the terms comes after.
Jesser, a leading basketball creator on YouTube and a long-standing 2K gamer, serves as honorary commissioner of NBAT2’s 2K league. The arrangement was negotiated collaboratively. “We agreed that he would wear an orange suit as commissioner because it would extend his brand in ways that fit but were different for him,” Andrew says. Jesser wore the suit independently at NBA All-Star Weekend, which Andrew takes as evidence the integration was genuine rather than contractual.
Within the structured league format, NBAT2 controls the competition structure, guardrails, and language rules. Outside it, on creators’ own handles, the goal is for content to remain native to each creator’s existing style. The company’s creative direction ends where the creator’s audience relationship begins. “We want them to be themselves,” Andrew says.
Brands Still Treat Social Like Television
Andrew’s most pointed market observation concerns brand marketers who approach social partnerships with the same creative controls applied to broadcast.
“Young people on social, they can sniff out what feels inauthentic or fabricated really quickly,” he says. When a trusted creator delivers scripted language on behalf of a sponsor, “that creator’s community knows it’s fake. They know it immediately.”
In his view, brands need to identify partners they trust enough to allow creative risk. “The brands that are willing to take that risk today are going to be so far ahead of their competitors three years from now,” he says. “Three years from now, all of them will have adopted more of this.”
Building Toward Bravo-Level Fandom
Andrew’s reference point for the kind of audience relationship he is building is Bravo. The cable network developed loyalty not through prestige content but through recurring characters and the sense that viewers were invested in an ongoing narrative. According to Andrew, roughly 30,000 people attend BravoCon each year because the shows and personalities feel central to fans’ lives. “That’s the kind of fandom that we want to create at NBAT2,” he says, describing the target as “fanatical commitment.”
Merchandise, membership programs, and expanded in-person activations are the business lines that follow that depth of fan investment, and none are fully buildable until the audience is there. “We’ll have far more in-person activation and experiences for our users,” Andrew says. “People want to be able to experience it live.” NBAT2 is currently in early market-education mode, bringing recent programming in front of brand marketers as proof of concept.
A July 2026 tournament for NBA players at Summer League, staged to feel like unscripted footage from a private event, captures what the company believes it can deliver: unfiltered player access in an off-court setting. “That’s the sort of programming that only we are able to do,” Andrew says.
“I do not think it is a zero-sum world,” he concludes. “The more collaboration across creators and across the businesses in the Creator Economy, the more everyone will succeed.”
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