The messy, stalled sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves could lead the NBA to change its rules on what types of transactions it approves, league commissioner Adam Silver said Wednesday.
Speaking in New York after the NBA’s board of governors meetings, Silver said the structure of the deal, with its delayed path to control and the lack of up-front cash, was “not ideal.” He added that the purchase agreement was negotiated in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, which he called “extraordinary circumstances.”
“I think once the dust clears on this deal, it may cause us to reassess what sort of transactions we should allow,” Silver said. “It met our rules from that standpoint, and it’s what Glen Taylor wanted and what [the buyers] were willing to agree to at the time.”
Alex Rodriguez and Marc Lore reached an agreement in 2021 to buy the Timberwolves from Glen Taylor in a four-stage transaction that, at Taylor’s request, wouldn’t transfer a control stake until 2024. The buyers have spent the last few years raising money to finance each subsequent transaction, but things fell apart in the last few weeks. Taylor said on March 28 that the deal was off due to missed deadlines; the following day the buyers told Sportico that Taylor had breached the terms of their contract.
The agreement features a pre-set mechanism for resolving disputes, Silver said. He added that the disagreement will likely be resolved via that process. If the deal falls apart, Rodriguez and Lore will retain the 36% of the club that they have already purchased, a result that’s also likely not ideal for the league or the team, given the tension between the two sides.
The NBA has taken the public stance that the fight between Taylor and the A-Rod/Lore group is primarily a dispute between buyer and seller, and Silver reiterated as much on Wednesday, saying it was “not clear whether there will be a role for the league” in the ongoing dispute. That said, many in the industry have privately wondered whether the NBA should have approved a deal of this nature in in the first place.
The NBA isn’t alone in approving tiered deals. In 2022, the NHL approved the sale of the Nashville Predators to former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam. That deal involves four payments that start with an enterprise value of $775 million and end with a 2025 payment that values the team at more than $900 million.