Kodi is one of the best-known media player application. And with the NBA League Pass Kodi add-on, it can become a basketball fan’s dream come true. Install that add-on to bring some of the best basketball action to your screen. With a combination of live streams, archived, and edited games, it has content for each and every basketball fan. And contrary to so many Kodi add-ons, this one is 100% legal and so is the content it proposes. There’s a catch, though. You’ll need a paid subscription to play most of its content. But if you’re a real basketball fan, you won’t mind paying.
Today, our intention is to tell you all you need to know about the NBA League Pass Kodi add-on. We’ll start off by showing you step-by-step how to get it and install it. Then, before we start our guided tour of what the add-on has to offer, we’ll give you some background on basketball in general and the NBA in particular. And since this add-on is not much more than a front-end to the NBA League Pass streaming service, we’ll also introduce the NBA League Pass, what it is, and how much it costs.
Consider Using a VPN When Using Kodi
Your ISP could be monitoring your Internet activity to ensure you abide by their terms and conditions. And if your ISP suspects, even erroneously, that you might be violating them, they can react by throttling down your speed, sending copyright infringement notices or even interrupting your service. A VPN protects one’s privacy by encrypting the data using strong algorithms that make it almost impossible to crack. Furthermore, a VPN allows bypassing geographic restrictions and/or blackouts. This is especially important with an add-on such as NBA League Pass. To protect local broadcasters, many matches are blacked out for viewers in the US and Canada. With a VPN, you could spoof your location and appear like you’re located somewhere else.
Choosing a VPN can be a difficult task. There are so many suppliers available. Important factors to consider are a fast connection speed to avoid buffering, a no-logging policy to further protect your privacy, no usage restrictions to access any content at full speed and software that is available for your device.
The VPN We Recommend for Kodi – IPVanish
We, at Addictive Tips, have tested several VPN against our criteria and the provider we recommend for Kodi users is IPVanish. With servers worldwide, no speed cap or throttling, unlimited bandwidth, unrestricted traffic, a strict no-logging policy and client software available for most platforms, IPVanish delivers impressive performance and value.
IPVanish offers a 7-day money back guarantee which means you have a week to test it risk-free. Please note that Addictive Tips readers can save a massive 60% here on the IPVanish annual plan, taking the monthly price down to only $4.87/mo.
Installing the NBA League Pass Kodi add-on
The NBA League Pass Kodi add-on is one of the “official” Kodi add-ons. This means that it is available from the Kodi add-on repository making its installation one of the easiest. And by virtue of being an official add-on, it also means you can get support from the Kodi team.
Just follow these simple steps and we’ll get you up-and-running in no time.
First, from the Kodi Home screen, click Add-ons in the left pane.
Then, click the Add-on Browser icon at the top left of the screen. It’s the one that looks like a small open box.
From the add-on browser screen, click Install from repository.
Find and click the Kodi Add-on repository from the list of available repositories. Your list could be different from ours, depending if you’ve installed alternate repositories and how many of them. On a brand-new Kodi installation with no other repositories installed, it would be the only selection.
Click Video add-ons.
Scroll down to the “N” section of the list of available video add-ons to find and click the NBA League Pass add-on.
The add-on information screen will open. Simply click the Install button at the bottom right to launch the installation.
The add-on and any dependencies will install and, after a short while, a message will pop up at the top right of the screen to confirm its successful installation.
That’s it! We’re done. Installing official add-ons is that easy.
Some Background on the NBA
Before we start exploring the NBA League Pass add-on, perhaps we should pause briefly and give you some background information. If you’re not that curious, you can just skip to the Guided tour section.
The National Basketball Association, or NBA, is North America’s men’s pro basketball league. It is composed of 30 teams–29 in the US and 1 in Canada. It is considered the world’s premier men’s basketball league. The NBA is also, along with the National Football League, the National Hockey League and Major League Baseball, one of the four professional sports leagues in the US and Canada. It is an active member of USA Basketball, the national governing body in the USA. Its Players are known to be the best-paid athletes by average annual salary.
A bit of history
The precursor of the NBA, the Basketball Association of America (BAA) was established in 1946 by a group of owners of major ice hockey arenas in the Northeastern and Midwestern US can Canada. They wanted to keep their arenas occupied on days with no hockey matches.
The very first game took place on November first, 1946 in Toronto, Canada when the Toronto Huskies hosted the New York Knickerbockers at Maple Leaf Gardens.
The association merged in 1949 with the National Basketball League, a competing league and was renamed to its current name. Back then, several smaller Basketball leagues existed in the US but Today, the NBA is the only remaining one.
The NBA went through phases of shrinkage and expansion and had only 8 teams at its lowest point in the 1953-1954 season: the New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Philadelphia Warriors, Minneapolis Lakers, Rochester Royals, Fort Wayne Pistons, Tri-Cities Blackhawks, and Syracuse Nationals. All remain in the league today although some have moved to larger cities.
And how about basketball?
Just like the NBA is relatively young, at least compared to other American pro sports league, so is Basketball. The game was invented in 1891 by Dr. James Naismith. Naismith, a Canadian Physical Education teacher, who was working at a YMCA in Springfield.
He was trying to keep his gym class active on a rainy day. He wanted a vigorous indoor game that would keep his students occupied during the long New England winters. After rejecting other ideas he found either too rough or not suited to gymnasiums, he wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto a 10-foot elevated track.
In contrast with modern basketball nets, this peach basket had a bottom. Balls had to be retrieved manually after each “basket” or point scored. This quickly proved inefficient and the bottom of the basket was removed, allowing balls to be poked out with a long dowel.
The peach baskets were replaced by metal hoops with baskets in the early 20th century. They were originally nailed to the mezzanine Balcony of the playing courts. This too proved impractical when spectators in the balcony started interfering with shots. The backboards were introduced to prevent this interference with the added bonus of allowing rebound shots.
What is the NBA League Pass?
In a nutshell, the NBA League Pass is the National Basketball Association streaming service. It allows subscribers to watch live games and on-demand games. Content can be watched on no less than nineteen different platforms. And this doesn’t even include the Kodi add-on which is just an extension of the web streaming capability.
The service allows one to choose from Home, Away, English and Spanish broadcast options. And the Mobile View is a unique way to watch live basketball, zoomed right into the action.
Packages and pricing
There are three subscription levels to the NBA League Pass. The NBA Team Pass is the entry level and gives you access to all games from one team of your choice. It is available for $19.99 a month or $119.99 for a whole season.
The next level allows you to watch live and on-demand games for all teams. The price of this access is $28.99 monthly or $199.99 for a year.
The top tier at $39.99 a month or $249.99 a year adds the possibility to watch the in-arena streams, which are exempt from commercials.
A word about blackouts
In order to protect local and national broadcaster’s rights, the NBA League Pass imposes some content blackouts. For example, a user living in Boston, Massassuchets would not be able to watch live nationally broadcast games and live Boston Celtics games. He would have access to all on-demand content, though. A VPN can help you circumvent those blackouts by making you appear to be located in a different location.
Guided tour of the NBA League Pass Add-on
Before we start exploring the NBA League Pass Kodi add-on, let’s clarify something. Although any user will be able to browse the add-on’s menus and see what content is available, watching actual content does require a paid subscription to the NBA League Pass service.
Once you have your paid subscription, you need to enter your NBA League Pass credentials into the Kodi add-on. To do that, you open the add-on’s settings and fill in your email address and password in the appropriate fields.
While on the subject of settings, the last option, Favourite Team, lets you pick one of the 30 teams as your favourite. This selection will be used to populate the Favourite Team’s Games section. More about it later.
The NBA League Pass add-on main menu is pretty simple.
With only five options, chances are you won’t get lost. In fact, navigating this add-on is very easy and most menus and sections are quite self-explanatory. Let’s see what each section has to offer.
Live Games
The Live Games section is where you’ll find the most interesting content. Each game, except those that are blacked out, is available. When you click that selection, you’ll see a list of that day’s games, their time and the teams playing. Clicking any given game reveals yet another menu that allows one to choose a specific stream.
The selection may vary from game to game but it will always at least include the home feed and the away feed. The difference is that one gives you the feed from the home team broadcaster and the other gives you that from the visiting team’s. Several other options will give you other feed such as the ESPN feed or feeds in different languages, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Korean or Mandarin.
As we’ve explained before, subscribers to the top-level package will also have access to an in-arena feed. This is the feed that is used for the giant screens within the arena. It is a commercial-free feed
Archive
The next section, Archive, is where you’ll go to watch past games on demand. Its operation is just as easy. The first two options, This week and Last week list all the games from a given week, from Monday to Sunday. Choosing Select date opens a screen where you can type in a specific date. After clicking OK, you’ll get a list of all the games on the week that includes your specific date.
Just like the Live games section, this section also allows you to pick one of the several different feeds to watch. And similarly to the previous section, the exact feed selection varies from game to game.
NBA TV Live
The third section, NBA TV Live is just that. It features content from the famous basketball channel.And just like the previous sections, several options are available.
The first option, Watch live, lets you view a live stream of the NBA TV channel. You’ll see the exact content of the NBA TV channel. The next section Watch today’s programming allows you to choose one of the day’s programs and watch it on-demand. And the third option, Select date, lets you enter a date and select a program to watch form a list of that day’s programs.
For those of you not familiar with it, NBA TV is a cable and satellite TV channel owned by the NBA and operated by Turner Broadcasting System. It is available to some 53.8 million households, throughout USA and Canada. the channel was launched on March 17, 1999 as nba.com TV. Originally meant to be just a barker channel, as time went on, more varied programming was added, including international basketball leagues and programming from FIBA usually unseen in the American market.
Video
This next section offers several interesting on-demand feeds. The first option, Top Plays, will let you view the best of all the games from the past seven days. Next, the Shaqtin’ a fool section features page after page of Shaqtin content. Next comes The starters which, like its predecessor, also has page after page of video content,
The Highlights section has game recaps from all games in descending chronological order. If all you want is to quickly catch up on past games but don’t have time to watch them in their entirety, this selection is for you,
Finally, the Smitty under the rim section is another one with page after page of basketball-related content,
Favourite Team’s Games
Last but definitely not least is the Favourite Team’s Games section. To use it, you’ll first need to specify your favourite team in the add-on’s settings. If you haven’t done that yet, a pop-up will remind you and clicking OK will take you directly to the settings page.
Once you’ve set your favourite team, selecting that selection shows you all the games from your team in reverse chronological order.
Conclusion
Provided that you’re willing to shell out the necessary money, the NBA League Pass Kodi add-on will let you watch great basketball games right from within Kodi. Furthermore, you’ll be watching them in full legality. The user interface is super easy to navigate, the streams are of high quality and they all work, unlike some other add-ons with tons of dead links. This add-on is a must for any serious professional basketball fan.
Are you a basketball fan? Have you tried the NBA League Pass Kodi add-on? How was your experience? Was it as good as ours? Did you encounter any issues installing and/or using the add-on? Let us know about your experience using the comments below.