Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The owners of the Boston Celtics said on Monday that they are planning to sell the team, less than a month after the NBA franchise won their league-record 18th national basketball championship.
The Celtics are expected to set a record price for an NBA team, having been valued by Forbes at $4.7bn in October. The team was purchased for $360mn in 2002 by a group led by Wyc Grousbeck, a Massachusetts native and venture capitalist, Bain Capital’s Stephen Pagliuca, and real estate developer Robert Epstein. Pagliuca also owns Italian football team Atalanta, the 2024 Europa League champions.
In a statement, the team said that the board of the ownership group, Boston Basketball Partners LLC, “expects to sell a majority interest in 2024 or early 2025, with the balance closing in 2028” and that Grousbeck will remain as team governor until 2028. As the controlling family, the decision by the Grousbecks to sell the Celtics was made “for estate and family planning considerations”.
The Celtics defeated the Dallas Mavericks in last month’s NBA Finals, cementing their status as the most successful club in league history and earning their second championship under the current ownership.
The NBA is in discussions for its next round of broadcast media rights, with fees to the league expected to roughly double from their current average of $2.7bn per year.
Team valuations have skyrocketed in recent years, with the sale of the Phoenix Suns and its WNBA sister franchise, the Mercury, setting the record of $4bn in 2022.
At the same time, the sale of the 2024 Western Conference finalist Minnesota Timberwolves is in dispute and headed to arbitration in the autumn, after controlling owner Glen Taylor withdrew his sale of the club to ecommerce entrepreneur Marc Lore and retired baseball star Alex Rodriguez. That transaction, agreed in 2021, was set to take place in a series of tranches ultimately valuing the Wolves and the WNBA’s Lynx at $1.5bn.
Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, said in April that “once the dust clears” on the Timberwolves sale, “it may cause us to reassess what sort of transactions we should allow”.
A spokesman for the NBA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. News of the planned sale was first reported by ESPN.