Brian Windhorst & The Hoop Collective - EMERGENCY POD: Reaction To Buss Family Selling Lakers

Episode Date: June 18, 2025

Brian Windhorst is joined by ESPN's Tim Bontemps and Tim MacMahon to react to the Lakers’ record-setting sale from the Buss family to Mark Walter, the CEO and chairman of diversified holding company TWG Global. The guys break down the huge impact this could have on the LA franchise, the ripple effects around the league, some fascinating details of the deal you may have missed and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, sports fans, the ESPN app has all of ESPN all in one place. The ESPN app is your home to thousands of live events, ESPN shows, and originals across every ESPN network and service. And now you can check if you already have ESPN Unlimited as part of your TV package for no additional calls. Visit activate.esPN.com to learn how to access your account or sign up, then start streaming in the ESPN app. It's all of ESPN all in one place. Sign up or activate now. Hello, welcome to The Huclective podcast. We talk about the NBA, which we're doing on an emergency podcast here, which we've never done before over the sale of a team, to my knowledge.

But this is one of the biggest sales of a sports teams at American Sports History. Joining me from down the street from me at Game Bridge Fieldhouse is Tim Bontem's. Hello, Brian. I would say it's definitely the biggest, too. Correct. Joining us from a few floors above him on the concourse in GameBridge Fieldhouse, it's Ban McMan. Howdy, partners, as usual, I am well above Bon-Tips. All right, so Shams Tarania broke the news a short time ago that the Lakers were going to sell from the bus family,

we're going to sell majority control to Mark Walter and the group led by TW's G Capital, formerly known as Guggenheim Partners. Guggenheim Partners owns the Dodgers, among other things, including Chelsea FC. Two or three years ago, they bought 27% of the Lakers. I'm going to go into aspects of the deal. The key is this is going to be for evaluation of $10 billion. That's the number you're going to see across the globe, $10 billion for a majority control of a sports team. It won't actually be $10 billion.

It'll be the percentage of $10 billion that they're going to buy. They own 27%. The bus family owns 67%. So what I think is happening here, and this is all just now coming out, is the Mark Walter, who's the owner of the Dodgers will buy a percentage to take him to the majority. What that percentage is, we'll see. My guess is that the bus family will retain some percentage. And Shams says a Jeannie Bus will remain the governor.

We'll see how long that'll be the case. There's a couple of things that I'm going to talk more about with the aspects of it. But Bontems, for basketball fans, what is the most important thing here? And why are we doing this podcast right now? Because it's a massive thing for basketball fans for the NBA, because for a long time, the Lakers would be as you, I think, would have described them in the past, would be house poor, which is someone who bought a department a couple years ago for the first time. I know it being house poor means, which means you own something, but you don't have a lot of actual cash. And the Lakers are a really rare team in modern sports in that the bus family that's owned and operated the business, team for the last 45 years or so, basically has all their assets in the Lakers themselves.

They're not, you know, like Steve Ballmer obviously has all these other businesses. Same with, you know, most of these other people that own these, whether it's NFL teams or NBA teams or whatever, other than NFL teams, or this is the case in some of them, the vast majority of teams across other sports, it's a part of a bigger business empire. And for the bus family, the Lakers have been the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars for them on every front. And so that has led the Lakers to operate in a way that isn't what you'd necessarily expect of a team with their star power and brand and buying power in the marketplace. And if it's a similar situation, albeit in a different sport, that would happen when the McCourt

sold the Los Angeles Dodgers to Todd Walter and the rest of the Guggenheim group several years ago, you don't have to follow much of baseball to know what's happened since then. The Dodgers have turned back into an absolute superpower after being a team that was fairly, you know, a regular dormant in the National League. And the Lakers obviously have had some success, getting LeBron there, won the title five years ago, made the conference finals a couple years ago. But they have not, over the last 10 or 15 years, had the success that they did over their first 50, 60 years of the franchise in the distance when they only missed the playoffs a couple

of times or a consistent perennial championship contender. This move could potentially put the Lakers back into that kind of conversation and could put the kind of financial horsepower we've seen behind, say, the Clippers across town, behind the biggest brand in the NBA and one of the biggest brands in all professional sports and has a chance to do things for the Lakers that, you know, they have not had the ability to do over the past 10 or 15 years. Yeah, basically the Lakers have been the most glamorous mom and pop shop in, you know, the world for a while now. My question, and there's a lot of questions around this, why would Jeannie Bus remain the governor? You know, what exactly does that look like if she doesn't have a majority of control, but she's the final decision. Like, I, why does, why does Wickru Spock get to remain the governor of the Celtics? Because when you're selling, you get to set the parameters. All right.

Well, and there's, how that plays out. There's a lot of the, there's a lot of devils in the details in all these deals. You lived through that to McVan, Dallas, where Mark Cuban was famously said. He is going to be fully in charge of basketball operations going forward forevermore. Obviously, he wasn't fully in charge of basketball operations basically immediately after selling the team. So let's just see that stuff is, I think, not really very important to the discussion now and about what the impact of this is going to be going forward. That's more window dressing on the much bigger deal, which is that the Lakers now have as much horsepower behind them financially as any team in the lead. as opposed to being at the other end of that spectrum for the past several years,

and that means potentially a lot of different things. Well, and it's great to have that horsepower, but as the Phoenix Suns and Madisbee are finding out the hard way, spending more doesn't guarantee success, and in some ways it can put handcuffs on you. But, yeah, I mean, certainly luxury tax and things like that are not going to be of great concern to the Lakers moving forward, more just the aprons and all those sort of things.

Okay, so why they might sell now is a couple of reasons that I can surmise. One is obviously that the Celtics just sold and reset the market at $6 billion. Two, they entered into an agreement that would allow Wickruzbach to be the governor, which is obviously something that I think Jeannie Bus wanted to do because that precedent was set. Three, the Lakers' primary source of income is their local TV deal. every team in the league gets the same amount of money from the national TV contract. The Lakers get as much as the Grizzlies. They obviously do well with the crypto.com arena, but they don't own crypto.com arena.

So, you know, certainly while that is a cash cow building, they don't own it. So they make a lot of money off of their games, but there are plenty of teams out there that earn money off Arena deal, arena sales more than the Lakers do. It's one of the reasons why Steve Ballmer wanted his own arena with the Clippers because they didn't own it either. Their local TV deal with Spectrum is the largest local television deal that's ever been done in the history of the NBA, but it pays them far and away. A couple years ago, when I got the books from the NBA books leaked to me, I looked at the Lakers local media revenue, and the Lakers roughly made as much in one week of the season as the Grizzlies did for the whole year off their media deal. Now, subsequently,

the Grizzlies have signed a new deal. I'm not saying that's still the case, but suffice to say it was a massive, massive advantage. The Lakers, you know, some teams that are rich, you know, are driven by their arena. That's the Chase Center, for example, for the Warriors. You know, that is a cash machine for them. You know, some are driven by their market and some are driven by local media, but this, but did not, nobody. And some are driven just by their owner. Right. Like Steve Balmer.

And a lot of them are driven by their owner. And for the Lakers, that, that local television deal is why the bus family could exist and why they could operate the team. And as we've talked about a bunch, I've reported on it a bunch, as the RSNs, the regional sports networks across the country have all fallen off. Yes, the spectrum deal is still in place. with the Lakers and with the Dodgers, ironically, I believe. But at some point, paying an exorbitant number, even for Laker games, that's going to run out. And whenever that did run out, the Lakers are not going to be in a position to keep all with everybody else. Now that is irrelevant. Okay. So the Lakers are still going to have to abide by the rules of the second apron, of the

aprons. It's not, you know, the thing that happened with the Dodgers when they bought them, the Dodgers were operating like a mom and pop shop in an uncapped league. And as soon as the Dodgers were owned by some of the deepest pocket people in sports, um, and uncapped, you all of a sudden see them, you know, rolling off World Series titles and having the highest payroll. Um, Chelsea FC, when, um, uh, you know, when, when, when the partners of, um, of the Guggenheim bought ChelseaFC, they set all kinds of records for how much money they were paying to buy players. In English soccer, the big money comes for the transfer fee. It sounds like the Lakers are all of a sudden going to be able to spend vast amounts

more than anybody else on players. I mean, in theory, you know, you could build your roster up and just pay an exorbitant luxury taxes, but they're not going to be able to out, you know, there's rules in place. Where this makes a difference is that the Lakers, because under the buses, they operated, you know, more shallow than the other teams, they're going to be able to invest in infrastructure. They're going to be able to invest in more player comfort. They're going to be able to invest in more scouting. They're going to be able to invest in more player development.

They're going to, you know, probably. Sorry, I thought you were stopping there. That's the important thing to talk about. Like, yes, there's a salary cap in baseball. There's not a salary cap baseball. There is in the NBA. But like the comparison with the Dodgers is not about they went and spent money on Chohei Otani and Buckey Betts and these guys. It's that they went out and hired Andrew Friedman, who is best seen as arguably the best executive in the league from the Tampa Bay race, a team that was built on winning on the margins, player development, building out a organization.

He comes to Los Angeles and the like the Dodgers have now the strongest and deepest organization in baseball. It's the same model of Steve Cohen when he bought the Mets for a, again. another guy with a bazillion dollars, he said, we need to model the Dodgers, not just in our ability to pay players, but also to pay for staff and all these other things to build out another franchise that had cash poor owners that was then bought by Steve Cohen. Same kind of thing. They want to build up the infrastructure around the team to keep up with the Clippers and the Warriors and all these other teams that have already been doing that for a very long time. More Hoop Collective Podcast after this.

All right. So that's where the Lakers are going to potentially change here. So all right. Do you want me to go into the deep nitty gritty on this or do you think I should not do that to our listeners? I mean, if it's going to be window story time, I think the list is always in window story time. And you can't tease deep, nitty gritty than not do it. Okay. It also means he wants to do it. So the Lakers are, Wendy, please. Before this deal, the Lakers were owned by three entities. The Bus Family Trust, which, as I said, owns about 67% before this.

Mark Walters Group, which was called Guggenheim Partners, but now is called TWG Capital or TWG Global. And Patrick Shunschong, who was at one time was the wealthiest man in California, a doctor who became very wealthy creating cancer drugs. He was the owner of Los Angeles Times, amongst other things. Those were the three shareholders. The Dodgers bought this guy named Philip Anshutts owned the 27% stake that they previously had. Anshutts is a billionaire who's based in Colorado. He owns the crypto.com arena. He owns all of L.A. Live.

He owns the LA Kings. Why did he sell? Well, after the Clippers were just announced plans to build their arena, there was an opportunity for the Lakers, because the Lakers lease was ending. Lakers had an opportunity to go somewhere else. They elected to re-sign their lease. There was a time at which the owners of the forum

wanted the Lakers to go renovate the forum and go back to the forum. But the Lakers decided to re-sign their lease at then-Stapleas at the Staple-Center about three years ago. As soon as the guy who owned the Clipper Doeocop Camerina got them to re-up into a long lease, whatever was 20, 25 years,

he immediately sold the team to the Guggenheim partners. As soon as that happened, there was an understanding that maybe someday, if Jeannie Bus was ever going to sell, that they would have the opportunity to buy because Philip Anshutts had in his deal a right of first refusal. If you were going to sell, he had the right to buy. So if they were ever going to be sold, it was probably going to be to Philip Anshutts. But Philip Anshutts, I'm not sure he wanted to pay $10 billion. And he also, I believe, is over around 90 years old. Just to be in the nitty gritty really quick. It's also the thing.

thing that Steve Pagliuka, the co-owner of the Celtics, did not have in his agreement as I believe the second largest shareholder under Wickroof's father Irving, which is why when the Celtics were sold, even though Steve Pagliuca was trying to buy the team and had a pretty high bid, he was not the highest bid and the team could get sold to somebody else. That was not the case here with the way this was set up. Okay. That's right. It's important to note. So if the team was ever going to be sold, it was going to be sold to Mark Walter in his group. they were never in position not to buy it. So it was understood that if the bus has ever sold, that it would be to that group. It was just a matter of would they ever sell. There are six

bus children, okay, four children from Jerry Bus's first marriage, two children from his second marriage. They each have equal share. For them to sell, they all had to, they had to, you know, have a majority of them. And so there were some in that group who wanted to sell, some in that group who didn't want to sell. So I'm sure there could be a whole movie made about how they came to the agreement to sell. The interesting thing that I want to bring up, you guys know that I, well, I'll just wait for that. So TWG Global in, well, two interesting things happened in April. One, well, I probably got extended. That wasn't that big of a surprise because he had done the Lucca Dantzich trade. but oftentimes you will see before sale key people get extended.

And then in late April, TWG Global announced a $15 billion fundraising effort. Fundraising sounds weird, capital raising effort, and they wanted to create a fund that they would use to invest in sports. $10 billion of that money was invested by Mubedala Capital. Mubedala is Abu Dhabi. So as you guys have heard me talk about Abu Dhabi and Abu Dhabi's deep interest in investing in the NBA and American sport, you know, Abu Dhabi, you know, Mubadala capital wouldn't be able to directly buy the Lakers, but certainly.

they could invest in something to buy the Lakers. And so, you know, there's a lot that, you know, TWG Capital has a lot of investors. A lot of, they control a lot of money. I'm not just saying that one money, one piece of money goes together. I think we should say, just to be clear, Mark Walter had the money to buy the,

buy the Lakers in this manner. I'm not saying, I'm not saying what you're saying is wrong, but it's worth pointing out that it's not necessarily a, one-to-one thing. Like the fact that I think it's very relevant to point out

that Abu Dhabi's involved, but the Goop, you know, the Dodgers financial engine is because these guys have a ton of money and he just bought, he just got an expansion formula one team.

He's invented, like you said, they thought Bowley, another guy with them was behind Chelsea spent all this money. They have a ton of money to spend. So in their press release from two months ago, they said that,

They plan to, quote, build up sizable stakes in a range of sports assets in the years leading up to this investment. So they announced a $15 billion raise with $10 billion from Abu Dhabi to invest in sports assets. And two months later, they buy the Lakers for $10 billion. I'm just pointing that out. You guys know how I feel about Abu Dhabi. I am very interested in how they're interested in sports and everything like that. Just thought I would point that out. To anybody who-

You also like the golf course is there. Yeah. To anybody who might say that the reason that the Lakers are selling for this money is that it's Luka Dantzich effect. Obviously getting Luka Dantzich is a big thing for the Lakers. It certainly brightened their short-term future. The Lakers were worth $10 billion before Luca Dantzich. They're worth $10 billion after Luka Dantzich.

What you're buying is the, which you're buying. you're buying is the brand. Again, on its face, the Lakers, they don't own their own arena. They don't control a big, giant piece of real estate. They don't, you know, have, they're just, you're buying the, the blue and, you know, the, well, the gold. And those are all, and those are all reasons why. That's right. And those are all reasons why the Lakers are being sold, right? If the Lakers were owned by Steve Ballmer for the past 15, years, right? I'm not saying the odd court results would be better or worse. To your point, McBahn, Matt Isp has got plenty of money. The Sons are not in a great spot. But they probably

would own their own arena. They probably would have all these other kinds of things that they don't have, in part because the Lakers were not in position to do that kind of stuff. Now they're going to be in position to do whatever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, which is a much different reality, not just for the Lakers, but for the rest of the NBA, because the Lakers are already sitting there as the number one brand in the sport with all these built-in advantages behind them without any of this stuff. And now, like the Dodgers again, to go back to when these same people bought it from the McCourt family, that's when things change to the Dodgers. It's certainly very possible. It could change that way for the Lakers.

More Hoop Collective Podcast after this. So in the short term, I don't think it necessarily affects any of the Lakers business. They're still not going to have cap space. They're still going to want to extend Luca Dunchich. They're still going to be looking for a center. They still have a couple of draft picks. They're still bound by the rules of the aprons. But on a grand scale over the course of time, it could change the Lakers. If you are a Lakers fan, I would say that you should be very appreciative of the bus years because Jerry Buss turned them into this brand that's selling. And I think you should be very excited about the new horizons that depocketed newer, more savvy ownership could bring.

I don't know if you agree with that or not. Well, it's also not new. They're not going to have new owner syndrome either. Like, you literally just have to look across town to Chavez-Rivine to see what happened with the Dodgers. It's like these guys came in. And again, it's not just as simple as they bought a bunch of players. Like, they built out as good an organization as there is in baseball and probably arguably across sports when you look at how much they've invested across the board and all sorts of

stuff. And if they do that with the Lakers, like you said, over the long haul, the Lakers will be better off. You know, the Thunder, we're sitting here with the Thunder and Pacers in the NBA finals, right? For the Oklahoma City Thunder to win the NBA title, they have to do a whole lot of things right and a whole lot of things have to break their way, right? The Lakers, for better or worse, are starting the race way out in front of teams like the Thunder and Pacers, like they just are. So if you remove these issues that the Lakers have had, it gives you that much more of an ability to take advantage of the head start that the Lakers have, where over the past 15 years or so, they really haven't. And that's allowed them to stay in the same group as a lot of these other teams.

Because again, if you go back in earlier times when the financial situations among the owners was not as big of a difference. It's not a coincidence. The Lakers were always awesome. There's a lot of reasons for that, and those reasons haven't gone away. So now one of the things that's been a potential hurdle for them is now

cleared out of the way for it. It is interesting though. Oklahoma City, obviously, one of these smallest, isn't the smallest market in the league? It's one of them, whatever. I think it's second, but either way, it's a very small market, but all the things you're talking about in terms of like what you can do with money.

I mean, the Thunder have an extraordinarily deep staff. I mean, you talk about scouting, you talk about analytics, you talk about coaching, player development, you know, commitment to their G-League, a beautiful new basketball facility. You know, as we're walking around Oklahoma City, the former convention center, the demolition has started on that because it's about to be this billion-dollar basketball palace that like Clay Bennett, the Thunder's owner contributed 50 million. The city's building this palace for them.

So for being a small market franchise, the Thunder have positioned themselves with the help of the city, but really Sam Presti's vision has positioned the Thunder to have an incredible amount of advantages. And this is kind of a move for the Lakers to try to catch up to anybody little OKC. That's true. That is 100% true. I'm not saying San Presti is showing up in L.A. because I do not think that will be happening. But again, it is not a coincidence that when these guys bought the Dodgers, what did they do?

They went and hired Andrew Friedman. For people who don't follow the Tampa Bay raise, that was a team that was built on building to the draft, having a lot of young cheap players. They didn't have a ton of payroll money. They were way behind the Yankees and these other teams. But they were competitive every year because they had an incredible infrastructure to bring in talent and bring in new ideas and ways to compete, despite not having that financial light behind them. And then you take a guy like that, you give them all the financial resources and things look a lot different.

So again, if you're a Laker fan, you want a blueprint for what this team is going to look like going forward. That I think is a blueprint of what you can expect them to do. Again, not based off of just pie in the sky thinking, but based off of literally what they did across town with another iconic team that was in need of some boosting up from a financial backing standpoint and what they did after they took home. So yesterday, Oklahoma City announced their lease extension with the Thunder. It's been in the works for a while after they got the arena approved.

But I'm sure they took advantage of it to announce it during the finals. But they actually signed it yesterday. Keeps them in Oklahoma City through 2053, I think. And they were touting that the, you know, Clay Bennett, the owner is one of the greatest Oklahomans of his generation, it's like anything would happen. But they were touting how that the fee for them ever to move was a billion dollars. That it was, you know, all this is happening. And, you know, the thunder aren't going anywhere.

It's going to be a billion dollars. And I kind of smiled because it sounds like a lot of money. But in all honesty, you know, to move a team, a billion dollars is really, you know, depending on where you're moving them, it's not overcomeable in 2025, much less, you know, 2045. I don't want to set anything off. I'm just saying the, you know, OKC was like a billion dollars. Like, no way this team's going anywhere. We know they're not going anywhere.

But a billion dollars is, you know, by, you know, 10% of the Lakers. And they've come a long way from the days of having a facility that smelled like burning dog food. Anyway, all right. This could be a, this can end up being one of the most important things that happens to NBA hierarchy of the decade. So or not. There's one other thing we should discuss really quick before we go, which is we talked about this with the Celtics sale. The reason Adam Silver was waiting to move forward with expansion, which he said at his game one, pre-game one annual press conference that it's going to be on the agenda at next month's board of governors meeting in Las Vegas and that he all but confirmed it's going to be recommended to committee, which is the next step. in the process of having expansion come to the NBA, was waiting to see that $6 billion

dollar valuation for the Lakers, a number that you heard around the league. For the Celtics. For the Celtics, I'm sorry. That was the number that you heard around the league was one, the league hoped to get and would help to set the groundwork for what the price would be for potential future expansion teams. Obviously, future expansion teams are not the Los Angeles Lakers, but it does not hurt that the previous record for purchasing an NBA team, which was,

66% higher than the prior bid was just eclipsed by a bid that was 66% higher than that. So when you think about it that way, if you're looking forward to expansion in the coming years and you're a fan, I would assume most particularly in Seattle and Las Vegas, I would feel pretty good about the idea that this is only going to add fuel to the fire of expansion coming to the NBA because this is a reminder. Let's say those two teams go for an average of $6 billion. that's $12 billion total, that number does not get split with the players. That gets split with the 30 current owners. That means every current owner would get a check for $400 million.

So when you start talking with numbers like that, that is where expansion comes into play. And again, you're a Sonics fan in particular. I'm sure there's a lot of people in Seattle. We're not very happy that the Oklahoma City Thunder are one to win away from winning their first NBA championships since moving the team there back in 2008. but today is a day where I think if you're a Sonics fan, you got closer to getting a team in Seattle again. And so if nothing else, you could take heart in that.

All right. Well, more to come on this. Thank you for listening to Hoot Collective. Thank you to Bontemps. Thank you to McMahon. Thank you to Jackson for scrambling here in the middle of a halacious storm in Indianapolis. We will talk to you soon. Yep. Thunder was rolling through Indianapolis today.

Adios amigos.