I Would Pay $11 Billion For the Lakers—and Not a Penny More

The Los Angeles Lakers, who have won 11 championships since 1980, are now the most valuable sports team in history.

I would have paid $11 billion. Just saying.

I’m a little short—right now I’m short by roughly $11 billion—but I would have made a few calls.

Instead the Los Angeles Lakers, the shiniest franchise in the NBA, winners of 17 titles, the purple and gold haven of Jerry West, Magic Johnson and Kareem-Abdul Jabbar, have sold a majority stake to investor Mark Walter, possessor of another vaunted L.A. franchise, the baseball Dodgers.

The deal values the team at $10 billion—shattering the record for the sale of a professional sports team.

I’m going to assume this is not a wedding present for Jeff and Lauren.

The sellers are the Buss family—specifically, scions of the late Jerry Buss, the charismatic real estate baron who bought a scruffy franchise in a wobbly league for $67.5 million from Jack Kent Cooke and polished it into Showtime, a hardcourt nightclub (with an actual nightclub) where Jack Nicholson took a prime seat and the men in shorts became as famous as the actorly locals.

The Buss family has agreed to sell a controlling stake in the Lakers to Mark Walter, who also co-owns the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Even if they were called the Lakers because they moved from Minnesota, it was a perfect merger of franchise and city—and retains an undeniable allure. From Magic & Kareem to Shaq & Kobe to LeBron & Luka, the team has been saturatingly covered, occasionally chaotic, but never dull. With film and TV contracting and studio power yielding to tech nerds, the Lakers might have been the most glamorous buy left in town.

Now they belong to someone richer. Jeannie Buss stays installed as the Lakers boss for an unspecified amount of time, but the sale confirms an era’s end.

These are no longer charming family offices. Gone are the days when a chemist Ph.D. turned entrepreneur playboy can cobble together enough to own a team.

Today you need 10 figures just to knock on the door. The Lakers’s $10 billion valuation makes the $2 billion Steve Ballmer paid in 2014 for the crazy cousin Clippers look like a Jell-O shot at the checkout line.

It’s almost a full $4 billion more than what a group agreed to pay for the Lakers’s historical antagonist, the Boston Celtics, just a couple of months ago.

Jack Nicholson’s presence at Lakers game helped the team establish a reputation as the NBA’s most glamorous franchise.

Is it sensible? Is it sustainable? Is this the peak? I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know. Just a decade ago it was possible to pick up a major U.S. sports team for a few hundred mill. The recent exponential growth is attributed to exploding media rights deals driven by hungry networks, changing consumer habits—and a wild case of serendipitous timing.

Basically, people don’t watch live TV anymore, except for sports. Even if they don’t watch the NBA like they used to—and if this year’s Finals ratings are an indication, they definitely do not—live sports delivers a captive audience with attractive demographics. Networks and streamers remain frisky to spend.

For now.

Does that make a team worth $10 billion? You know what they say: If you have to ask…

Since Magic Johnson joined the team in 1979, the Lakers have fielded some of the starriest names in NBA history.

Clearly the Lakers are one of a kind, on a very short list of the most desirable professional sports outfits on earth. There aren’t many on that shelf. The similarly attention-sucking Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. The Yankees. The Warriors. The Knicks. Real Madrid. Manchester United. The reigning World Series champion Dodgers—now conjoined with Showtime.

Running a basketball club is different from a Major League Baseball team, of course. The Dodgers thrive by blowing everyone out of the tank with spending. The NBA doesn’t roll like that. There’s a salary cap and spending penalties designed to build parity and raise the hope of every team, except for the Washington Wizards.

Fresh Laker Luka Doncic is due for an outrageous raise, but it’s not going to be Shohei Ohtani money. Sorry, Luka.

LeBron James and Luka Doncic are the latest superstar duo to land on the Lakers.

Amid the sale afterglow, a warning: pretty soon, if not already, we are going to run out of high net worth individuals who can single-handedly write a check for a ball club.

I would not put this on the list of the world’s greatest crises—I would put it somewhere between an Easthampton parking ticket and an upholstery delay for a jet interior—but it’s a real issue, and one of the reasons why you’re seeing the incursion of investment consortiums and private equity.

Times are getting hard for the simple three comma billionaire. If you’re just a schmuck with a helicopter pad, a private island, a Telluride chalet, three Monets, and a Tuscan villa, forget it.

Sports teams are going to require oligarch money. Archipelago money. Spaceship money.

I wonder what Jerry Jones is thinking right now with his beloved Cowboys. If someone inquires, he should ask for the moon.

I mean the literal moon. Jerry should see if he can get that—plus $20 billion.