For the Love of the Game

When financiers

Marc Lasry and Wes Edens bought the Milwaukee Bucks in 2014, the team had the worst record in the NBA, it played in one of the smallest markets and the price—$550 million—was the highest ever for a professional basketball team.

Lasry and Edens know about distressed assets. They’d purchased billions’ worth of beat-up bonds, bank loans and companies. But $550 million for the Bucks? The team hadn’t won a league championship since 1971, and it was 15-67 for the 2014 season.

“So, why do it?” Lasry asks Robb Report rhetorically. “Because that was the price.”

Then-owner Herb Kohl, a former US senator, wanted $550 million, and he wanted the team to stay in Milwaukee. No amount of negotiating would change his mind, Lasry says, and Kohl could stick to his guns because the market for sports teams is unlike almost any other, except maybe art. The assets are rare, difficult to compare and in high demand, even now, after a pandemic that has kept fans and their wallets away from stadiums and arenas worldwide.

“My phone has been ringing constantly over the last year from people who are interested in buying a team,” says Steve Greenberg, managing director at Allen & Co., a boutique investment bank. “And we’ve had very, very few calls about selling teams. A huge amount of wealth has been created over the last decade, so there are buyers out there, and that is very good for prices.”

Case in point: the New York Mets. The Wilpon and Katz families put the team up for sale and engaged Greenberg (considered by many to be the best sports banker, ever) just before Covid-19 emerged. They kept the team on the market, even as the