The fissure disrupting and possibly terminating the sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves recalls the business and legal maneuvers that saved the team from relocating 30 years ago this spring, as well as some machinations concerning ownership transactions involving three of the state’s other major professional sports franchises.
The current contretemps revolves around the prospective sale of the controlling interest in the 35-year-old basketball team to a partnership composed of former baseball star Alex Rodriguez and businessman Marc Lore, who acquired a minority interest in the club in 2022 from owner Glen Taylor, who also owns the Star Tribune. That interim relationship was part of a $1.5 billion deal that was to climax last week with transfer of an additional portion, giving them 80% ownership.
But, as the club experiences nearly unprecedented success on the hard court, contending for the lead in its Western Division, the ownership arrangement seems headed to the courtroom, a forum that the organization has familiarity with from a prior legal ownership dust-up three decades ago.
The current controversy, like most others of its ilk, involves money; the Rodriguez-Lore group apparently does not have or is unwilling to ante up enough of it to make the final payment to seal the deal, according to Taylor, whom the aspiring purchasers claim has “seller’s remorse.”
The buyers’ financial inability to complete the transaction has a semblance of reality. Shortly before the scheduled closing of the transaction right before Easter, they brought in a new unrelated investment group as a participant in the ownership team — a sign that their finances may be faltering — prior to Taylor declaring that the transaction shot clock has expired and the deal was dead due to the buyers’ failure to meet the payment deadline shortly before April 1.
Nothing to see here, assured the putative buyers, just a matter of completing some routine paperwork required by the National Basketball Association, which has been reticent on the matter.
But Lore has not. While he and Rodriguez wait in the on-deck circle, to mix a baseball metaphor, he has threatened a lawsuit to compel Taylor to consummate the transaction.
But litigation does not seem in the offing now as it seems the dispute is headed to arbitration, pursuant to a clause in the purchase agreement calling for that forum to resolve disputes.
New Orleans overture
The tumult recalls how the Timberwolves, then in their infancy, almost moved out of the state in 1994 in another ownership squabble.
The team’s original owners, local business buddies Marvin Wolfson and Harvey Ratner, sought to bail out in response to an overture by a group headed by boxing promoter Bob Arum based in New Orleans that had recently lost its NBA franchise, the Jazz, to Utah.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the Big Easy: the prospective transfer was halted by an injunction issued by Judge James Rosenbaum in a federal court lawsuit in Minneapolis, later upheld by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals amidst dueling cases in U.S. District Court here and a competing one in Louisiana state court seeking to proceed with the transaction down there.
With the legal stand-off at a logger’s head, Taylor, a former Republican state senator and extremely wealthy Mankato business mogul, stepped up to the plate, to mix yet another metaphor. He purchased the team from Marv & Harv, in order to keep it here, by paying $94 million for the club, now valued at some $2.5 billion, remarkably the second lowest in the league. That’s nearly a 30-times increase.
Other ownership woes
A trio of the area’s other major professional athletic clubs have gone through their own versions of onerous ownership angst over the years.
The Timberwolves’ NBA predecessors, the five-time post-World War II NBA championship dynasty Minneapolis Lakers, left town in 1960 for greener and greater greenbacks in Los Angeles after new ownership here tried unsuccessfully to overcome box office struggles due to inadequate facilities.
Another winter-centric Minnesota team, the hockey North Stars, was relocated in 1993 by its disgruntled Canadian owner, Norm Green, to that hockey paradise of Dallas and later captured a National Hockey League Stanley Cup championship trophy six years later that for some 26 years had eluded its northern predecessor. The North Stars were replaced in 2000 by the expansion Wild and continue struggling for a NHL title.
The football Vikings have also experienced their share of ownership fracases, including the failed effort by thriller author Tom Clancy in 1998 to buy the club from a local consortium for $600 million, which fell apart when it was revealed, after Clancy announced the prospective purchase, that he was missing one essential feature: a signed contract.
In stepped Texas car dealer Red McCombs to buy the club and operate it for seven years, constantly agitating for a new facility, which finally got built, the U.S. Bank Stadium, after he sold out to another non-Minnesota group, the current owners, the New Jersey-based Wilf brothers, for $246 million, a four-fold increase.
Then there’s the baseball Twins, whose season is just getting started under the Pohlad family, which bought the team in the midst of a threatened departure in the mid-1980s due to declining attendance when owned by the Griffith family.
The team’s two World Series titles in 1987 and 1991 preceded a bungled effort to sell the club and move it to North Carolina in the new Millenium. That suspect maneuver was followed by the prospective demise of the team as part of Major League Baseball’s planned “contraction” to eliminate it and one other club for financial reasons, a prospect squelched by another court injunction issued in 2022 by the late Hennepin County District Court judge Harry Crump, leading to construction of Target Field in 2010. It was an illustration of the time honored tenet, like the Timberwolves-New Orleans courtroom clash, of “home field” (or court) advantage, in which the litigant closest to the courthouse almost invariably wins.
So, the Taylor v. Rodriguez-Lore brouhaha at Target Center, while unsettling, fits into the Minnesota professional sports ownership legal lore.
How the Timberwolves tussle over ownership will play out remains to be seen. If it succeeds in its drive for its first NBA title, the championship hardware, known as the Larry O’Brien trophy for the former league commissioner and John F. Kennedy New Frontier politico, may have to be divided in half between the two contending ownership groups.
That would be a real form of Solomonic justice.
Marshall H. Tanick is a constitutional and employment law attorney with the Twin Cities law firm of Meyer Njus Tanick.
