Meet The Billionaire Owners Facing Off In The 2024 NBA Finals

Wyc Grousbeck’s Boston Celtics are looking to win a record-breaking 18th NBA championship, while Mark Cuban, Miriam Adelson and the Dallas Mavericks are trying to score the franchise’s second title.

_{By Justin Birnbaum, Forbes Staff}

After the Boston Celtics defeated the Indiana Pacers on their home court last Monday and advanced to their second NBA Finals in three years, managing owner Wyc Grousbeck took a moment to acknowledge a franchise legend who died that day. “All I can think about right now is that we lost a great Celtic today, Bill Walton, one of the greatest Celtics of all time,” the 61-year-old CEO said to the remnants of the Indianapolis crowd. “This is dedicated to Bill.”

Grousbeck may have only been in his twenties when Walton’s resurgence helped the 1986 Celtics win their 16th NBA Championship, but his passion for the franchise dates back long before he led a group of investors that bought the team for $360 million in 2002. The native Bostonian has rooted for the Celtics his entire life, and when Grousbeck and his family moved back to the city in the 1990s, he bought season tickets and remembers taking his young daughter to games.

Once he took ownership of the team a few years later, his primary goal wasn’t to get richer—though the Celtics are now the fourth-most valuable team in the NBA. Grousbeck even gave his fellow owners that same pep talk. “I said to everybody, ‘You’re coming in for love, and we’re going to be paid in enjoyment,’” he recalls. “That was the only goal—to win a championship, not to make money.” The Celtics did just that, winning the title in 2008, and the team can add a record-breaking 18th championship to their illustrious history when they tip off against the Dallas Mavericks Thursday night in the 2024 NBA Finals.

But even if making a lot of money wasn’t Grousbeck’s intention, that hasn’t stopped the franchise from doing just that. The Celtics are the 18th most profitable team in sports, generating an estimated $269 million in operating income combined over the last three seasons. By Forbes’ estimate, Boston is now worth $4.7 billion, including debt, a roughly 1,200% increase over the price Grousbeck and his partners paid. That exponential growth has also translated into considerable wealth; Forbes estimates the family of Irving Grousbeck, Wyc’s father, is worth $1.8 billion.

They’re not the only ones getting rich off the NBA’s rapid growth this century. Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks for $280 million in 2000 and, in October, Forbes valued the franchise at $4.5 billion, three spots behind the Celtics. The 65-year-old billionaire reportedly cashed out a considerably lower price, selling most of his ownership stake last year to Miriam Adelson, widow of Las Vegas Sands chairman and CEO Sheldon Adelson, and her family at a $3.5 billion valuation. The sale of the Mavericks is still undoubtedly a boon to Cuban’s $5.4 billion fortune and, in a unique twist, he remains in control of basketball operations for now.

Since 1998, when Forbes started tracking the values of sports franchises, NBA teams have appreciated some 2,200% on average. The Celtics and Mavericks are among the 10 teams to experience the most growth during that period. And regardless of which team hoists the Larry O’Brien trophy this year, that growth shows no signs of slowing down. The NBA is reportedly closing in on a new set of media rights deals that would pay the league $76 billion over 11 years, more than double its previous average annual rate.

“I’m kind of laughing at fate that everything got so appreciated,” Grousbeck says. “Who knew? I didn’t know. I would never claim that I knew the teams were going to appreciate like this.”

COURT BATTLE

How the billionaire owners in the 2024 NBA Finals match up.

Boston Celtics

For Grousbeck, the idea of team ownership began with his father. Irving, a successful entrepreneur in his own right, founded Continental Cablevision in 1963 and merged it into telecom company US West 33 years later. In the 1980s, the elder Grousbeck mulled buying the Boston Red Sox, but as his son says, “He never got a deal that made sense to him.”

By then, Wyc had embarked on his own entrepreneurial path. Law school brought him to the West Coast, but he abandoned his days as a corporate attorney in favor of a Stanford MBA and a career as a venture capitalist. He started out at a time when the internet was just taking shape and scored big wins with companies such as digital retailer eToys.com, web search engine and portal Lycos and medical technology company Conor Medsystems.

With some capital to his name, Grousbeck found a new idea in a different industry altogether. After relocating his family back to Boston in the 1990s, he immediately reveled in the city’s rich sports scene—in addition to buying season tickets for Celtics, he also had seats for the New England Patriots, Boston Red Sox and Bruins. Basketball proved to be a unique opportunity, however. The Celtics, he recalls, were filling only about half of their arena for each game, and the team was partially owned by a limited partnership traded on the New York Stock Exchange, giving a clear look inside a cash flow-positive business.

Confident in the vision he had to make the team better, Grousbeck met with then-Celtics owner Paul Gaston at his Manhattan townhouse. Ten minutes later, he walked out with a handshake agreement. “Anybody on Wall Street could have gone and bought this team because it was public, it was right there,” Grousbeck says. “But I was the one that made the call and got the appointment, and he named what he called a crazy number, and I just accepted it on the spot and made it work.”

That purchase price was $360 million and Grousbeck didn’t have anywhere close that sum. With three and a half months to raise the money, he mortgaged his house, sent a non-refundable, eight-figure deposit and borrowed 50% of the sale price. To secure the balance, Grousbeck assembled a group of more than 20 partners, including his father, Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca and TPG Capital cofounder David Bonderman. The group, Boston Basketball Partners, completed the sale in 2002.

Grousbeck took the reins as the Celtics’ governor, a position required by the NBA to own at least 15% of a franchise. But having a wide range of owners has played to the franchise’s benefit. Pagliuca, for example, was instrumental in bringing former Celtics great Danny Ainge back to the franchise as director of basketball operations. Under the hyper-competitive Ainge, the Celtics acquired future Hall of Famers Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to pair with long-time franchise player Paul Pierce. The team won the NBA championship in 2008, a moment Grousbeck says he thinks about “every day,” and have made the playoffs 15 out of 16 years since.

Basketball also opened the door to another venture for Grousbeck. In 2019, he launched Cincoro Tequila alongside his wife, Emilia Fazzalari, Los Angeles Lakers co-owner Jeanie Buss, Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Wes Edens and a basketball Hall of Famer who cost them all a few championships, Michael Jordan. Cincoro has sold roughly two million bottles in the past five years, according to Grousbeck, and recently added some new investors, including legendary athletes Serena Williams, Derek Jeter and Michael Strahan.

Grousbeck’s life story is also the inspiration for the NBC sitcom Extended Family (produced by his friend, Red Sox owner Tom Werner), starring Donald Faison as the owner of the Boston Celtics and Jon Cryer as his wife’s ex-husband, who lives with them.

MONEY BALLERS

How the two highest-paid players in the 2024 NBA Finals square up.

Dallas Mavericks

Much like his Celtics counterpart, Mark Cuban has had a lifelong passion for basketball. He graduated from Indiana University in 1981, the same year legendary coach Bob Knight won his second National Championship with the Hoosiers. As the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban has garnered a reputation as a superfan, sitting courtside, cheering his team on and drawing the occasional technical foul.

By the time Cuban purchased the franchise for $280 million in 2000, he had already become quite wealthy. The son of working-class parents, he founded software reseller MicroSolutions in 1983 and sold it seven years later for $6 million. “The day I sold MicroSolutions, I took of my watch and said I’m never going to wear a watch again because I never want to be on anyone else’s time,” Cuban said recently on The Draymond Green Show. A brief retirement ensued, but it didn’t last long. In 1995, Cuban joined forces with an old college friend, Todd Wagner, and bought into Broadcast.com, then called AudioNet, which explored the idea of giving fans access to play-by-play coverage from out-of-market locations.

The company was struggling, unable to find the right medium and even experimented with shortwave radio before Cuban and Wagner brought it online. As the Dot-com bubble surged, Broadcast.com had the best-ever IPO at the time, surpassing a market cap of $1 billion on its first day of trading. One year later, in 1999, Yahoo bought the company for $5.7 billion (and then shut down the website in 2002), netting Cuban an estimated $1.1 billion payday after taxes.

It didn’t take long for Cuban to start spending his newfound fortune. “I was 40, 41 years old [and] I would play pickup three to four times a week,” he said on Green’s podcast. “So, the idea of going and getting up shots with [Steve] Nash and Dirk [Nowitzki] and [Michael] Finley and getting into little runs and not embarrassing myself completely back then, that was like a dream.” Cuban bought the Mavericks from Texas real estate developer Ross Perot Jr. in 2000, admitting he didn’t even negotiate.

Under Cuban, the Mavericks have enjoyed a wealth of success on the court. They’ve qualified for the playoffs in 19 of the last 25 seasons and defeated LeBron James and the Miami Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals. His tenure hasn’t been without controversy, though. In 2018, Sports Illustrated spoke to more than a dozen current and former employees in a detailed investigation that exposed a hostile work environment in the Mavericks organization. “It’s wrong. It’s abhorrent. It’s not a situation we condone,” Cuban said in a response to Sports Illustrated. While claiming no knowledge of the scandal, he took accountability and later hired former AT&T Chief Diversity Officer Cynthia Marshall as CEO to clean up the organization.

But last November, Cuban’s time as Dallas’ majority owner came to an end when Miriam Adelson and her family purchased 68% of the Mavericks at a reported $3.5 billion valuation, with the option to buy more. To fund the deal, Adelson sold some $2 billion worth of stock in Las Vegas Sands Corp. Her son-in-law, Patrick Dumont, now serves as the team’s governor, in addition to his role as chief operating officer of the casino and resort company.

For now, Cuban retains a 27% stake in the team and control of basketball decision-making. When asked why he sold out of the Mavericks, Cuban pointed to his new partners’ strong ties to the casino and hotel industry since Texas has been wrestling with legalizing gambling and sports betting for several years. “They’re not basketball people; I’m not a real estate person. That’s why I did it,” the Shark Tank cohost told the Dallas Morning News.

Adelson’s push for legalized gambling in the Lone Star State has been anything but a secret, and an additional plot of land purchased from Cuban across from the Mavericks’ home arena, the American Airlines Center, hints at aspirations for a Dallas-based casino and resort. She donated more than $2 million to a Texas-focused political action committee in 2022, as well as $1 million directly to the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, according to NBC News. With a net worth of $29.7 billion, Adelson is the second-richest owner in the NBA, only trailing Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, who is worth an estimated $122.4 billion.

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