NBA

“And I say that because, according to the NBA's investigation and my own, this was not merely a scheme that he ran to funnel money with one company aspiration. He did it with four. He did it with the scoreboard manufacturer, multi-million dollar deal for Kawhi …”

“This was the biggest punishment for an owner in the history of, I think, American professional sports, and the NBA took five first-round picks, which is the most you could imagine. They took thirty million dollars, which is a rounding error, of course, for Bal…”

“When Kawhi Leonard got a slap on the wrist, only 700,000 dollars, no suspension, no voiding of the contract, no nothing. He agreed to a settlement that was quite favorable, and the question was, why? Well, Kawhi Leonard's settlement meant that the arbitration …”

“He has now threatened personally with litigation Adam Silver by name in a letter through his lawyers.”

“Jordan actually bought an NBA franchise, and suddenly the man who won six rings by trusting a system, he was a nightmare in the front office, burned through six head coaches, trusted his gut over every expert, and posted the worst record in the league.”

“So in the long run, if the main reason to subscribe to any given channel ends up being actually about the game content itself and not differentiated by stuff around the game, then the excess profits in the long term Will just be captured by the rights holders …”

“Is it's not driven by attendance. It's not driven by wins or losses. It's driven by subscriptions to streaming services.”

“So with the NBA and NFL and MLB and the premier league in the UK and others, we work really closely with them to, if they identify a pirate stream for us to, you know, pull that down.”

“By cutting back to 40 minutes from 48, it's equivalent of shaving about 14 games off the season, which I think will help The players' bodies, and I think it would make the games better, because, you know, we all kind of pitter-patter till the fourth quarter, a…”

“If I can put into Cognition, or any of these things, and develop my own game that's personally tailored for me with a couple clicks of a button. Why would I watch, you know, the NBA when, like, this game I made for myself has all my favorite things in it, and …”

“Of course some people can beat the market. People have beat the market, and they'll continue doing that. And some people have done that profoundly well. But it's like asking, you know, should most people try to get in the NBA? Like, no.”

“He reworked my contract to make me one of the highest paid in the NBA, But he did it, and then I said, well, how much I owe you? He said, I don't want nothing from you.”

“Variety reports 81% of sports bettors bet On NFL games versus just over 50% for the NBA and 44% for Major League Baseball.”

“And if you look at the data, US adults as a whole, 33% say the NFL is their favorite professional sports league. But if you look at Gen Z, only 23% of Gen Z say That the NFL is their favorite professional sport, so 10 points less than the broader population, a…”

“From a revenue perspective, the NFL today makes twice as much as basketball, but that's a pretty damning trend, looking at where Gen Z's interests lie.”

“I don't think this ever would have happened or happened in the same way in the NBA. The NBA embraced both social media and the strategy of letting players have their own platforms, be their own voices and promote the league through that.”

“LeBron has well over a hundred million social media followers. Instagram alone. And the two largest NFL players by social media following are OBJ and Tom Brady, both of which are in the low teens. So like a 10 X difference.”

“The superstars in the NBA, like LeBron James, including sponsorships, makes one hundred and twenty seven million dollars a year. There is no one in the sport of football that comes close. There are three basketball and three soccer players at the top of the li…”

“The Super Bowl draws one hundred twenty seven million viewers, and that is growing. The NBA Finals per game draws just ten million viewers, down from its peak in the 25 to thirty million during the Michael Jordan era in the nineties.”

“There's not a single athlete That you've, you will ever talk to who's retired, who doesn't say something like, I wish I enjoyed playing more, because at some point it just goes away, and then at that point the winning and losing stops mattering, and all they t…”

“I don't believe that traditional business is going away for a long time, because a lot of us sports guys have, the NFL, the NBA, has still sold stuff there, plus also sold it to the Amazons of the world”

“They're tougher in the WNBA, and every time LeBron goes up, and he gets fouled, ah, and he's just, ah, and he's flopping all over the place.”

“I think it's a great product because there are 18 different ways you can throw up 43 in a game.”

“In 2010, The NBA couldn't even sell the New Orleans franchise. There were no buyers. And the valuation had gone down.”

“So this season, right, starting with the NBA season, how well that does in terms of driving subscriptions and reducing churn, that's going to make or break everything that comes forward for all sports.”

“I think the strategy is changing right in front of our eyes. I think there'll be fewer max players coming up.”

“Halle is not a top five NBA player, right? Maybe top 15.”

“When I did the deal, the presumption was that I would still be running basketball, and we tried to put it in the contract, but the NBA said, the governor is the governor, and they make all final decisions”

“And over the course of this tour, we're going to sell close to a quarter of a million tickets throughout the U S at very, very meaningful ticket prices, average ticket prices that rival an NBA or an NHL game.”

“We were the first sports league on YouTube, the first sports league on Instagram, the first sports league on Snap.”

“By the time I left, 80% of NBA consumption on YouTube happened outside the US.”

“Major League Baseball took a very different approach in the sort of middle of the last decade, and didn't allow nearly as much content on social. And you weren't seeing youth viewership increase for them. You were actually seeing youth viewership decrease at a…”

“And if you look at the average audience age of the NBA, which is a decade younger than the NFL in the US, you know, it's hard to draw a direct line between those two things, but I have to think there's a pretty strong connection that the availability of and th…”

“We did a focus group of teenagers in Mexico. And we asked them to bring their most treasured sports item. Their most treasured sports product. And so I was expecting soccer jerseys of their favorite team and the, you know, soccer ball or baseball bat from thei…”

“I saw data that said that the- Lowest free throw shooting percentage of the league for the visiting team is against the wall.”

“Our sport has, like, the highest engagement rates across all sports. Even comparing to NBA and everything”

“The number of teams in the NBA is the same. They're about to launch, they're about to open up two new franchises, and each one of those will get six billion. And then that revenue goes to the other owners”

“So thus sparks, unquestionably, truly unquestionably, this is in zero way a controversial statement, the most brilliant, most successful sports entrepreneurial business plan Of all time. The Indian Premier League, a domestic, city-based cricket league in India…”

“The big four sports leagues in the US, the MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL, have outperformed the stock market meaningfully, and over a period of 1961 to twenty-twenty-four, it's 13% annualized versus 10% annualized. And I know it doesn't sound like a lot when I bill i…”

“An average of 1.6 million viewers per game.”

“When we started, it might have been one or two percent of business would go through the NFL or Major League Baseball or NBA's direct-to-consumer business. Today, it's about a third would go through their own direct-to-consumer business.”

“The NBA has been terribly managed.”

“I think it's Bronny James playing with his dad, LeBron. I think it was an incredible moment, and I think LeBron deserved it for everything he's done for the NBA.”

“And so I did consulting for them and I started from the bottom, right? People were like, who are you? I was doing some support tickets for them et cetera, explanations. But then I started getting contracts like the NBA, you know, ticket master. I'm in Dubai ta…”

“It is harder to break into the Holy Trinity than the NBA.”

“Most big sports would absolutely love to have everyone's audience right now, which is 41% female, 32 years of age, which I think when you look at the NBA or the NFL, we're talking fifty-year. Years of age on average or 45 years of age on average, and it's a ma…”

“NBA all the way to MLB are somewhere between 51 and 45%. UFC is 13 to 14%.”

“I found that a lot of guys played for financial stability. Once they got that financial stability, the passion, the work ethic, and the obsessiveness was gone.”

“A good competitor always evaluates his opponent and you understand him for what he really is. You never try to give him confidence. You try to take it at all times.”

“Yeah. It has to be lifetime.”

“The collaboration and the friendliness of the people, other owners. Now, on the court, it's fierce competition, but at the end of the day, like, in the NBA, we're all a business partnership, and guess who we're competing against? Other forms of entertainment.”

“It's like clearly flailing, right? As like a sports platform, which you think was supposed to be the whole global thing, but like it's going in super weird directions and I think not successful in its strategy, right? Versus like the NBA and NFL, right? I thin…”

“The college football Television ratings are much higher than NBA ratings for, you know, any given game.”

“77% of the time that was their best performance of the week. Why? Because they relaxed into it. They weren't forcing anything. There was more of an allowing mindset that was there.”

“Anything that I was seeing or going to see, any type of defense or offense or player or team, they had already encountered years before. I talk with them to learn how to deal with these challenges. After all, why reinvent the wheel when you can just talk to th…”

“Whenever you get a chance to play against these guys, don't be afraid, man. Just play your game. You'll be surprised. They go for all the moves that high school guys go for.”

“Famously, there was a clause in Michael Jordan's contract called for the love of the game clause, meaning he could play basketball anytime and anywhere he wanted”

“She had mentioned doing small resonant breathing before every timeout. And so we have 14 timeouts. Every game. And so I started to ask, like, how many of those are on autopilot? How many of those are you, like, bringing yourself back down to a certain level? H…”

“Twitter has, 30% of Twitter's customer base were unseen. There were media organizations. People like the NFL, the NBA HBO, who wanted content, their content to reach more people, to be in conversational spaces. And they were essentially business customers and …”

“When I bought a piece of the Warriors, the funniest thing was I got a call from the NBA, because you have to submit like this huge application, like, you know, Everything. Open the kimono. And they knew that I was a big fucking sports better, and they were lik…”