The Buss Family Is Officially Selling The Lakers For 10 BILLION DOLLARS Making It The Largest Sale Of A Professional Sports Franchise On Earth
Unique Nicole. Getty Images.Well holy shit! Certainly not the Shams bomb I think any of us were expecting at this time of the year, but make no mistake that's a pretty massive Shams bomb. The Buss family has owned the Lakers since 1979, and even if they do have to lie about how many titles they have as the LA Lakers due to some sort of weird inferiority complex to their cross-country rival, that doesn't mean the Lakers aren't a legacy franchise. This isn't just the sale of any franchise, it's the LAKERS.
It's also something that I don't think many Lakers fans will be upset about. In fact, my guess is they are thrilled to finally be out of the shackles of the Buss family. Even though things always seem to magically work out for the Lakers, it hasn't exactly been smooth sailing these last few years when it comes to ownership/front office etc.
As they say in life, everything is about timing. As the Lakers inch closer and closer to a post-LeBron world, and the fact that they are about to be on the hook for a MASSIVE Luka Doncic extension, perhaps the Buss family looked around and decided that this was the perfect time to cash in their chips. As a reminder, Luka can sign this summer for a standard 4/228.6M extension or he can opt to hit free agency
We just saw Wyc Grousbeck do this same thing with the Celts sale last summer. He took his Dad's credit card and spent money like it was going out of style. Everyone got $100M+ extensions. It was awesome. Then before the bill came due he cashed in for $6.1B, and the Celtics don't even own their own arena! Think about that for a second!
If a historic team like the Celts can get that type of price without even owning their building, what's the Lakers' price? An $8B valuation? More? How about a cool $10B
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Yeah, I'd probably sell my majority shares at that point too. It's not only now the highest sale evaluation/price of any NBA team ever (BOS, $6.1B), it's another $4B more. As Shams explains, it's the highest valuation of any sports team on Earth. My brain cannot even comprehend that much money and at some point, everyone has a price. You get a cool $10B and don't have to worry about whether Luka's extension ages well or what things look like without LeBron? Sounds pretty good to me.
As a Lakers fan, it wouldn't just excite me to be free of the Buss Family, but also the fact that they are being sold to a guy who clearly has no problem spending money on his teams. The Dodgers seem to be pretty good at spending money, so ideally, you hope that now translates into the Lakers. It's not like they sold to some guy who doesn't have the cash and may be looking to cut costs. Could this be another wrinkle to the Lakers/Clippers rivalry? Are we going to get a spend-off between Ballmer and this new guy? I say bring on the chaos!
It's pretty wild that in back to back summers, we've seen both the Celtics and Lakers be put up for sale (at record prices). It's also funny how often you hear that the NBA is a dying league and nobody is watching, and then here they are signing a $76B TV deal and then their two crown jewel franchises go for a combined $16B. Call me crazy, but things seem just fine!
If you own a team right now, at some point you have to wonder if you should flip it right? I mean we're talking about insane prices. With Steph Curry nearing the end of his career, are the Warriors next? Could they get $10B+?? Could James Dolan finally bite the bullet and cash in on the Knicks and MSG?? This is like when every house around you starts selling for crazy prices, you may not have considered putting your house up for sale, but sometimes it's hard to pass up on the cash. Now multiply that by a couple billion and it's basically the same thing here.