The Los Angeles Lakers have a new controlling owner, and the deal that got them there closed faster than most people take to sell a house. Josh Kushner, the venture capital investor, and Bob Iger, the former Disney chief executive, are buying a controlling stake in the franchise at a valuation of 12.5 billion dollars, the highest price ever paid for a team in the NBA.
The seller is Mark Walter, who bought the Lakers from the Buss family only about ten months earlier for 10 billion dollars. That timeline puts his return at roughly 25 percent in under a year, an extraordinary gain for an asset that does not trade hands often and rarely trades this fast. Iger himself said the pace surprised even the people closing it: once he and Kushner learned the opportunity existed, the deal closed in three days.
The 12.5 billion dollar price works out to about 18 times the team's estimated revenues, a multiple that says as much about scarcity as it does about basketball. Franchises like the Lakers change hands rarely enough that a buyer willing to move fast and pay a record price can still find a seller, even one who bought less than a year ago and has no obvious reason to sell beyond the number on offer.
Walter is not leaving sports ownership behind. He remains majority owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team he bought in 2012 for 2.15 billion dollars and that is now valued at 7.8 billion, a gain that took over a decade rather than under a year but tells a similar story about what has happened to franchise values across US sports. Walter, for his part, called owning the Lakers one of the great honors of his life. The sale still needs approval from the NBA before it becomes final.