Turner and the NBA today announced Drake – platinum-selling recording artist and multi-faceted entertainer – as host of the first-ever NBA Awards on TNT, airing Monday, June 26, with coverage beginning at 9 p.m. ET. The inaugural event, held at Basketball City at Pier 36 in New York City, will be the NBA’s official annual award show to honor all of the league’s top performers on one night for the first time.

NBA Awards presented during the show will include:

• Kia NBA Most Valuable Player
• Kia NBA Rookie of the Year
• Kia NBA Sixth Man Award
• Kia NBA Defensive Player of the Year
• Kia NBA Most Improved Player
• NBA Coach of the Year

Additional award categories will include fan-voted awards with categories and finalists announced this Thursday, April 27, during TNT’s Inside the NBA.

The 2017 NBA Awards on TNT will feature integrations with the Sports Emmy Award-winning Inside the NBA studio team of Ernie Johnson, Charles Barkley, Kenny Smith and Shaquille O’Neal, along with the league’s biggest stars, celebrity presenters and musical performances.

Additional information on the event will be announced at a later date. The NBA Awards on TNT, created by Turner Sports and the NBA, is produced by dick clark productions.

About Drake
Aubrey “Drake” Graham is a Grammy-Award winning, platinum-selling recording artist and multi-faceted entertainer. Drake’s recently released playlist, More Life, set the world record for the “Best First Day for an Album,” with 90 million global streams. Following its release, More Life topped the Billboard 200 albums chart with the largest debut of any album since last May’s Views. Views, Drake’s seventh album release in April of 2016, sat atop the Billboard 200 for ten consecutive weeks and earned over 1 million album-equivalent units in the first week of its release, as well as gaining over half a billion overall streams of the album. Views inspired the release of Please Forgive Me, a twenty-five-minute short film that stars Drake and features music from the album, which can be streamed on Apple Music. The corresponding Summer Sixteen Tour was sold out nationally through its run July-September of 2016, and featured rapper Future as co-headliner. For his work on Views and on the collaborative mixtape, What a Time to be Alive (2015), Drake was nominated for the most American Music Awards of all time. This honor was held previously by Michael Jackson. In October of 2016, Drake announced The Boy Meets World Tour which took place in Europe, through the spring of 2017. Drake’s previous albums, Thank Me Later (2010), Take Care (2011), Nothing Was the Same (2013), If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (2015), gained huge domestic and global success, and catapulted Drake to hip-hop infamy.

About Turner Sports
Turner Sports, a division of Turner, is an industry leader in the delivery of premium sports content across all multimedia screens. Turner Sports’ television coverage includes the NBA, Major League Baseball, NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, ELEAGUE and professional golf.  The company also manages some of the most popular sports destinations across broadband and mobile platforms including Bleacher Report and its top-rated Team Stream app, NCAA.com and the critically acclaimed NCAA March Madness Live suite of products, PGA.com and the Sports Emmy Award-winning PGA Championship LIVE, as well as an accompanying collection of mobile sites and connected device apps.  Turner Sports and the NBA also jointly manage NBA Digital, a robust collection of offerings including NBA TV, NBA.com, NBA LEAGUE PASS, NBA Mobile, the NBA App, NBADLEAGUE.com andWNBA.com.

About dick clark productions
dick clark productions (dcp) is the world’s largest producer and proprietor of televised live event entertainment programming with the “Academy of Country Music Awards,” “American Music Awards,” “Billboard Music Awards,” “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest,” “Golden Globe Awards,” “Miss America,” “Hollywood Film Awards” and the “Streamy Awards.” Weekly television programming includes “So You Think You Can Dance” from 19 Entertainment and dcp. dcp also owns one of the world’s most unique and extensive entertainment archive libraries with more than 55 years of award-winning shows, historic programs, specials, performances and legendary programming. For additional information, visit www.dickclark.com.