Charlotte Hornets has reported that Michael Jordans is finalizing a deal to sell his majority stake in Charlotte Hornets. His sale will leave the 30-team NBA without any Black majority ownership.
The Hornets said that Jordan is selling to a group led by Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall.
Plotkin has been a minority stakeholder in the Hornets since 2019 and Schnall has been a minority owner of the Atlanta Hawks since 2015 and also wants to sell his investment in that team.
Michael Jordan who bought the Charlotte Hornets in 2010 for about $275 million, will now be a minority shareholder, ending his 13-year run overseeing the team.
Members of the new potential Hornets ownership group are recording; J. Cole, Dan Sundheim, Ian Loring, country music singer-songwriter Eric Church, Chris Shumway, and several local Charlotte investors, including Amy Levine Dawson and Damian Mills.
“In the same way that it’s wonderful that one of our greatest, Michael Jordan, could become the principal governor of a team, he has the absolute right to sell at the same time,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this month at the NBA Finals. “Values have gone up a lot since he bought that team, so that is his decision.”
It’s not clear how long the process of selling will take to be finalized by the NBA’s Board of Governors.
Silver also said the Board of Governors is more concerned about diversity in ownership groups.
“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.”
Their selling price was not made available. However, sources say the Charlotte Hornets were valued at $3 billion.
Michael Jordan’s representative, Estee Portnoy, declined to comment on the sale.
The Hornets never reached a championship stage despite Michael Jordan’s legendary achievements – as a national champion at North Carolina, two-time Olympic gold medalist, six-time NBA champion, and in the never-ending debate as the best basketballer ever.
The 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.