Canzano: Two truths -- and a lie -- about Trail Blazers sale
A reach for some intel on the sale.
Want to own an NBA team?
There’s one for sale in Portland that is likely to sell for $4 billion or maybe $4.5 billion. If you put $50 million of your own money into a group, you’d expect to get a touch more than a 1 percent stake. If you put $500 million in, you’d get a larger share, but still, not a lot of cache.
The majority owner — the face of the effort — will need to come up with $1 billion or $2 billion. Back-of-the-napkin math suggests that the majority investor would need a net worth of $10 billion to $15 billion. It narrows the candidates considerably.
I spoke with the head of a sports investment group this week, who plans to kick the tires on the Trail Blazers sale and the looming NBA expansion franchises.
He told me, “Everyone wants to take the meeting and talk about it, to actually get them to write the checks is another deal.”
Is Phil Knight really out of this? Or is he just negotiating? Does local ownership matter? What will the appetite for outside investors be? And how does new ownership change Portland’s on-court team?
Two truths — and a lie — on the sale of the team: