Jordan Shorts the NBA
We are clearly past peak NBA as an all-time great player and smart businessman pulls his money out of the woke sports league.
Michael Jordan, a six-time National Basketball Association (NBA) champion and widely seen as the greatest pro basketball player of all time, is selling his majority stake in the league’s Charlotte Hornets franchise.
Jordan is going to make a huge profit on his investment. He bought the team for around $275 million in 2010, and it is now worth some $3 billion.
The AP’s story on the subject—reprinted at the NBA’s website—emphasized the team’s lack of on-court success during Jordan’s tenure as owner:
For as great as Jordan was on the court—national champion at North Carolina, two-time Olympic gold medalist, six-time NBA champion and in the never-ending conversation for best player ever—the Hornets never reached a championship level during his time as the owner.
Charlotte went 423-600 in his 13 seasons in charge, the 26th-best record over that span. It never won a playoff series in that time and hasn’t even been to the postseason in the last seven seasons.
The AP story also foregrounds the fact that Jordan’s selling of the franchise—in which he plans to retain a minority financial interest—means that the league will have no black owners. Approximately 72 percent of the players in the league are black. NBA President Adam Silver said he wants to have more black owners, while arguing there is little he can do about it:
“I would love to have better representation in terms of principal governors,” Silver said. “It’s a marketplace. It’s something that if we were expanding that the league would be in a position to focus directly on that, but in individual team transactions, the market takes us where we are.”
The league could block sales of its franchises, but of course Silver and the owners recognize limiting ownership to blacks for even a few franchise sales would reduce the teams’ monetary values radically, by severely driving down the number of potential buyers. The NBA’s owners and league offices are not stupid, merely opportunistic and driven by woke public relations concerns.
It was inevitable, of course, that the media reports on Jordan’s team sale would stress the Hornets’ poor win-loss record under his ownership—a legitimate point—and the upcoming lack of a black team owner. The latter is of course a political and cultural obsession among the nation’s most powerful media vendors.
The race angle, however, distracts from a more interesting observation: the fact that Jordan, a highly savvy businessman, is shorting the NBA. One of the league’s most successful players of all time is pulling his money out of team ownership in the league where he made his name.
The NBA has long been the “wokest” sports league and has befriended the Chinese Communist Party in pursuit of foreign money, while increasingly ignoring and directly affronting its U.S. fan base.
Jordan once said that he was staying out of politics as a player because “Republicans buy sneakers too,” referring to his extremely lucrative endorsement of Nike shoes and sportswear, along with many other commercial activities. The one thing that is certain about the NBA today is that it does not seem to care that Republicans buy tickets and watch television sports too.
The real lesson here is obvious once you look beyond the race issue. Jordan could easily afford to keep his majority stake in the Charlotte Hornets. He has in fact increased his portfolio by a couple of billion dollars by owning the team—thus far. That steady rise in value is about to end, solely because the NBA has chosen to reject its fan base and chase after a new one—like the corporate owners of Bud Light.
Jordan is fleeing the NBA in the wake of the league’s protracted rejection of its fan base in favor of political advocacy and foreign money. The league’s most successful player of all time is pulling his money out. Soon it will be very clear that the only thing that can save this direly woke sports league is …. Saudi Arabia.