Mike Vorkunov
speaker
601 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 27 Jul
Mike Vorkunov’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right. So like that's the pace that this is going at. The Bucs and Mark Lazarus sold his controlling stake, I think about like a year and a half after they won the title. But this one on the market two weeks after they got that ring title number 18 time to cash out.
So you guys are just like, hey, trying to drive this price down, basically. Basically, yes. Well, it's actually a twofold problem, right? You're going to have to pay a very large tax bill if you keep this team together. And next season, 25-26, the tax rates, whether you're a repeater team or a team who hasn't repeated in the luxury tax, jump up a lot if you're 20 mil over the luxury tax line.
And you have a choice then. Are you going to pay these exorbitant tax rates? And the Celtics will be repeaters. And I think it's like becomes seven dollars and twenty five cents for every dollar that you're over. Right. So you're talking about like a little more than seven X for every mil that you're over there, which someone can do the math on me. But I.
believe generally translates to a lot of money. And then the other question is like, all right, if you don't want to pay this money in the Celtics right now projected for over $200 million payrolls each of the next few years, because all those signings you guys mentioned, are you going to be the person who buys the Celtics and breaks up a title team? Right.
Like Derek White, Kristaps Porzingis, Jalen Brown, Jason Tatum, all under contract for the next few years. I think I'm forgetting someone else on top of that. But you're going to have to make a decision whether you want to pay those pay those taxes or whether you want to deal with the second apron restrictions, which might include a frozen pick.
Or you're going to be the one who says, hey, we got to start over and dip under.
Yeah, this this is going to be an interesting one. It might be have an impact on the expansion prices. It might also be kind of like the final capstone to this last decade or so of, you know, titanic valuations across the NBA. Right. The Suns. were valued at $4 billion when Matt Ishby had bought them last year. That's the most that an NBA team has been valued at when sold for a control sale.
And so I think the Celtics will go above that. They'll set a record for the NBA. Where it lands exactly, I don't know. You talk to smart people, they're like, hey, maybe it lands $4.75 billion, $5 billion. I talked to an NBA owner who thought it might land close to $6 billion. If it gets that high, then maybe the NBA starts asking for $7 billion when it goes to expand in Vegas, which...
A lot of money, again.
People keep betting parlays on FanDuel. I'm sure FanDuel will do very well. The big thing, though, is
the celtics are also an odd case right they don't own their own arena now real estate is a big proposition part of the value prop when you buy an nba team you want to own like essentially all of the revenue that comes with the team from tickets to gate to uh to media rights to all of it the other part it's a weird ownership structure like the grosbecks own 30 roughly according to my sources with grosbeck who's the controlling um owner right now owns about two percent his dad irv grosbeck who's uh
You know, 90 and they said the part of his estate planning owns about 28 percent there. And you've got a bunch of minority owners who have to kind of be dragged along in case of a sale. So this is this is a weird one, right? It might not be the perfect test case to see where everything goes.
And if you talk to people who are interested in investing in NBA teams and sports teams altogether, they think prices are going to keep going up, but maybe not like hockey stick prices. Up and to the right as it's been, but just maybe like a little bit slower. And so if you see some slower growth, what does that mean? The new media rights deal should really help.
But I think that's been baked into prices the last few years. People have been expecting it. Although, from what I understand, if I think it came in a little bit higher than maybe, you know, some people are expecting it. And the big question, really, and this goes back to what we were talking about with the tax rates and how much you want to pay for this.
If you are paying for a team to be really good and you're paying a lot. Right. That means you're over the first April and you're over the second April. That's around generally the point where it's actually maybe not even profitable to own a team anymore. Again, if you're losing a few mil and the valuation of your team goes up by like three billion dollars over the course of your ownership.
you know, small potatoes type of thing. But to some people that matters, right? And it gets into what and how you want to run your team. The Celtics and the Grasbeck family and this entire investor group bought them for $360 million 22 years ago. They're going to make, I don't know, 15, 18 times that, right? When they eventually sell, depending on where this all lands.
But they also, you know, they're in that place where they're paying so much into the luxury tax where they might not be able to turn a profit year after year, year over year, just like when you're taking all that into consideration.
I think you're going to have people begging to pay $150 a month for their old cable service. Like, it's going to be super annoying. You're going to have to have... You know, Amazon, you're going to have NBC, Peacock, ESPN, ABC, depending on the night of the week. Right.
Like League Pass, as you mentioned, you know, there will be more games on national TV, which will, you know, I guess help things in this in one sense. But also it just means you're going to have to subscribe to more different services to be able to watch those games. Right. And not to mention whatever happens with local TV, which at this point really is just super hard to predict.
I don't know where that's going to end up. I, you know, the Celtics are on NBC, a regional NBC network. Diamond sports has, I think 15 teams, 14 teams that has contracts with, and they're still in bankruptcy court. And they've been there for, I think two years now or something like that. So like, Where this all ends up is really hard to predict.
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