Happy Anniversary: The Celtics earned their 18th NBA championship exactly 16 years to the day of their last title.
Adam Glanzman/Getty Images
Wyc Grousbeck bought the team for $360 million in 2002 and just delivered the franchise’s second championship during his tenure—a league-record 18th title.
When Wyc Grousbeck purchased the Boston Celtics in 2002, he made it clear to his partners that it wasn’t about the money. “Imagine yourself being in a parade, if we win the championship, with your kids, getting a ring and hanging a banner,” the 61-year-old recalls saying. “We’re doing this for Celtic Pride.”
For the second time during his tenure, Grousbeck will have made good on that promise. On Monday, the Celtics earned a Game 5 victory over the Dallas Mavericks to collect their record-setting 18th NBA championship. Buoyed by a duo of stars in Jaylen Brown, the NBA Finals MVP, and Jayson Tatum, Boston ran through the playoffs, losing only three games, after posting a league-best 64-18 record in the regular season.
“We all watched the team the last few years—great teams, but not quite there,” an elated Grousbeck said to the sellout crowd at TD Garden in Boston. “And Brad [Stevens] was brilliant. We knew we needed to make changes. We knew we wanted to make changes, and Brad got it done. He brought in Jrue [Holiday], he brought in [Kristaps Porzingis], and here we are. Banner 18 is back!”
Making money may not have been Grousbeck’s primary goal, but that hasn’t stopped the Celtics from becoming a cash machine. According to Forbes, Boston is the 22nd most profitable franchise in all of sports, with an estimated $269 million in operating income combined over the last three seasons. The Celtics are worth an estimated $4.7 billion, including debt, a staggering 1,200% increase over the $360 million Grousbeck and his partners paid 22 years ago. Only three NBA teams boast valuations higher than Boston—the Los Angeles Lakers ($6.4 billion), the New York Knicks ($6.6 billion) and the Golden State Warriors ($7.7 billion).
That sky-high appreciation has made the Grousbecks quite wealthy. The family of Irving Grousbeck, Wyc’s father, is worth an estimated $1.8 billion, and they’re hardly the only ones benefitting from basketball’s financial golden age. NBA team values have grown roughly 2,200% since 1998, when Forbes first started tracking that data. During that period, the Celtics have the ninth-best appreciation rate among their contemporaries.
As the NBA continues to reach new heights, it makes Grousbeck’s entry seem almost clairvoyant. The league is reportedly negotiating a new media rights package that amounts to $76 billion in fees over 11 years, more than double its previous annual rate, while basketball continues expand globally and captivate fans in overseas markets. A recent survey by S&P Global Intelligence reported that 52% of online adults in China watch NBA games, as well as two-thirds of basketball viewers in France and Italy.
“I really like our chances to keep growing,” Grousbeck says. “The NBA is a great product or a great experience, and we have so many international fans.”
COURT BATTLE
How the billionaire owners in the 2024 NBA Finals matched up.
Buying the Celtics proved to be a fortuitous turn of events for Grousbeck, who obtained his Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan and began working as a corporate lawyer in the 1980s before realizing another career path might suit him better.
“I would look out at our parking lot, we shared a building with Kleiner Perkins, and all the lawyers were driving average cars and all the Kleiner guys had Ferraris and Lamborghinis,” he says. “I thought maybe I ought to make a switch.”
So, Grousbeck pivoted. He earned his MBA from Stanford University in the early 1990s and became a venture capitalist. The internet was starting to boom, and Grousbeck built a bankroll by scoring big wins with web search engine and portal Lycos, online retailer eToys.com and medical technology company Conor Medsystems.
Later that decade, Grousbeck and his family relocated back to Boston, and he went back to his roots as a die-hard sports fan of the city’s teams. (He bought season tickets for the New England Patriots and the Boston Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics.) While taking his young daughter to games, Grousbeck observed that the Celtics were lagging in attendance on a nightly basis. The team was also partially owned by a limited partnership public traded on the New York Stock Exchange, revealing a cash-flow positive business.
The idea of team ownership was something Grousbeck was somewhat familiar with. His father, who founded Continental Cablevision in 1963 and merged it into telecom giant US West 33 years later, considered buying the Red Sox in the 1980s. A deal never materialized, but it influenced the younger Grousbeck. Sensing an opportunity, he set a meeting with then-Celtics owner Paul Gaston and walked out with a handshake agreement minutes later.
“He got a record price for the team, $360 million,” Grousbeck says. “It was by far a record in the NBA, and he couldn’t have been nicer about the whole thing. I think he made a very reasonable market deal back then, and then we were all surprised by what happened to the team afterwards.”
MONEY BALLERS
How the two highest-paid players in the 2024 NBA Finals squared up.
Grousbeck didn’t have anywhere close to that sum, though, leaving him scrambling to fund the purchase. He started by mortgaging his house and sending a nonrefundable eight-figure deposit. Borrowing 50% of the sale price got him closer. In the end, Grousbeck assembled a consortium of more than 20 investors, including his father, TPG Capital cofounder David Bonderman and Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca. The newly formed group, Boston Basketball Partners, closed the sale in 2002.
Since then, Grousbeck has led the franchise as its CEO and governor, a position required by the league to own at least 15% of a franchise. That hasn’t stopped his partners from contributing. Pagliuca, for example, played an importing role in recruiting former Celtics great Danny Ainge back to the franchise as an executive. With the acquisitions of future Hall of Famers Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, and an incumbent star in Paul Pierce, Ainge quickly constructed a champion, with the Celtics claiming the NBA title in 2008. And while he’s now with the Utah Jazz, Ainge later traded away Garnett and Pierce, returning the Celtics draft picks that would eventually become Brown and Tatum.
Basketball has opened many other doors for Grousbeck. Five years ago, he launched Cincoro Tequila alongside his wife, Emilia Fazzalari, Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Wes Edens, Lakers co-owner Jeanie Buss and former Charlotte Hornets managing owner and Basketball Hall of Famer Michael Jordan. Since 2019, the company has sold two million bottles, Grousbeck says, and recently added a slew of athletes as investors, including Derek Jeter, Serena Williams and Dustin Johnson.
Grousbeck is also the inspiration behind NBC sitcom Extended Family, which is produced by his friend, Red Sox co-owner Tom Werner, and stars Donald Faison as the owner of the Celtics and Jon Cryer, his wife’s ex-husband who lives with them. Meanwhile, he’s raising a third fund at his venture capital outfit, Causeway Partners, with the first investment being a “pretty sizable position” in the newly formed, for-profit golf entity PGA Tour Enterprises.
“I’m in there alongside John Henry and Steve Cohen and Arthur Blank,” Grousbeck says. “Causeway is in there in a reasonably big way by our standards.”