Basketball veteran and entrepreneur Junior Bridgeman is buying part of the team he played for, reaching an agreement to acquire a 10% ownership stake of the Milwaukee Bucks, according to a person familiar with the transaction who asked not to be named because the move has yet to be approved by the NBA.
Terms of the deal, first reported by CNBC, aren’t publicly disclosed, but the person familiar with the transaction said Bridgeman is buying the 10% stake at a $3.4 billion valuation. Limited partner sales will typically be at a discount to headline club values.
A quarter of the club was sold last year at a $3.2 billion valuation to Dee and Jimmy Haslam. The average NBA franchise is worth $4 billion, according to the latest Sportico valuations.
Bridgeman had a 12-year NBA career starting in 1975, playing for division-winning Bucks squads of the early 1980s. Later in his career he began buying Wendy’s franchises, using them as the basis of a successful restaurant business after retiring in 1987.
He eventually built that business to 360 Wendy’s and Chili’s restaurants, which he sold in 2016 to take over a Coca-Cola bottling franchise. That business, Heartland Coca-Cola Bottling, serves Kansas, Missouri and southern Illinois. According to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence, Bridgeman owns all of the bottler, which has at least $530 million in annual revenue.
Bridgeman also co-owns Coca-Cola Bottling of Canada, a business he acquired with Larry Tanenbaum, chairman of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment in 2018, and in 2020, Bridgeman bought the publications Ebony and Jet.
