I don’t know Bill Chisholm. Not many people around here did before he emerged as the leader of the group that just bought the Boston Celtics. But not only has he burst onto the Boston sports scene as the new, front-facing owner of one of the world’s most valuable franchises, he’s in the middle of a whirlwind that could reshape the city’s sports landscape.
It’s a lot. Especially for a guy who was a mystery six months ago.
He’s closed the deal on the Celtics, buying 51% of the team at a $6.1 billion valuation, and then committing to buy the rest of the team in a few years at a valuation of more than $7 billion. It took him a while to cobble all the money together, in the process putting together a group of co-owners that includes Wyc Grousbeck, Aditya Mittal, Bruce Beal, Andrew Bialecki, Dom Ferrante, Rob Hale, Mario Ho, and Ian Loring. They will serve as the team’s managing board. Global investment firm Sixth Street is also a major participant in the investment group.
Of course, it’s understandable that Chisholm would need help getting $3 billion together for this part of the purchase. Few people have that kind of money lying around. Sixth Street is reportedly committed to kicking in more than a billion dollars, and the eight other co-owners on the board can help spread the cost around nicely. And if this is where the story ended, it’d probably just be a chapter of how buying a sports franchise works in 2025 and beyond.
Team valuations are astronomical. The Portland Trail Blazers just sold for $4 billion, and the Lakers sold for $10 billion. It’s impossible for every team to be owned by one person now. Consortiums, including private equity funds, are going to be part of the process. But there's more going on with Chisholm and the Celtics.
Steve Pagliuca, who lost out on his bid to buy the Celtics, entered into an agreement to buy the Connecticut Sun and move them out of the WNBA’s smallest market into Boston. The league immediately balked, and it was reported that they’d prefer Chisholm eventually buy the team.
So on top of his financial commitment to purchase the Celtics, now Chisholm is being linked to a companion WNBA franchise. It’s a franchise that Pagliuca was ready to pay $325 million for, and then pony up a relocation fee, and THEN commit $100 million to a Sun practice facility.
But the WNBA isn’t satisfied with those terms, instead reportedly preferring the Sun move to Houston and Boston enter the bidding for an expansion team, which, of course, would come with a hefty expansion fee. And, by then, who knows how much more the team will be worth.
And sure, it makes some sense to tie the NBA franchise to the WNBA team in the same city. Teams could be packaged in marketing deals and the cross promotion could create a seamless basketball season that covers all 12 months. They’d have to find ways to bring in extra cash because the expansion fee for the W’s three new teams was $250 million apiece. Committing to buying a new franchise adds another half a billion to Chisholm’s tab, and that's before figuring out where the team practices.
It doesn’t end there.
The Boston Globe floated possibilities for a new Boston Celtics arena, listing five potential sites and specifically saying “don’t count out the idea of the C’s moving into a new basketball palace on the north banks of the Mystic River.”
There's space in Everett near the Encore Casino that is ripe for clearing and developing. Of course, the Kraft family is already trying to build a 25,000-seat stadium for the Revolution in that area, which would probably complicate things. The Krafts have been in a protracted battle over a stadium in or near Boston, spending years fighting to get something built. Even now, the Krafts and the city of Boston are sniping at each other over the proposal, which could head for binding arbitration by the end of the year.
This is the Kraft family, mind you. They have been here forever, tried many different ways to get stadiums built in Boston. They’ve been dealing with Massachusetts politicians for a quarter-century, and they're still stuck.
But the Globe and the Boston Celtics are joined at the hip, and nothing goes into those pages about the team that isn’t based in some sort of reality. Chisholm and his investors are looking for a return on all the money they're spending, so they're at least going to venture into the political wilderness to see if they can find a place to homestead.
That would be another billion-dollar process, including an initial outlay of lobbying cash to get some influential people on their side. They won’t just be able to sidle up to politicians at a cocktail party and cajole commitments over Grey Goose martinis. And don’t think the Jacobs family, owners of Delaware North and the TD Garden, are just going to let Chisholm take their best tenant away and build a major competitor across the river. They won’t just sit idly by as the Celtics take their business elsewhere while stealing concerts and shows. They would put up a fight.
Call me crazy, but it feels like a lot of Chisholm’s money, or credit, is being spent in bunches before he’s even made a major decision about the Boston Celtics.
It took a long time and a lot of people for Chisholm to come up with half the money to complete the first part of this purchase, but he’s already being linked to a WNBA team and a new arena. And even those might make sense on their own, the pile of potential money being spent and the number of investors it would take to get something like this done feels a bit out of control.
All of which calls into question how their primary investment, the Boston Celtics, will be run. They have talked a big game about not playing for second place, but are they fully committed to the financial needs of this team? If they truly have a grand vision of a new arena that hosts the Celtics and the Boston Whatevers of the WNBA, will they quickly get stingy with the Celtics in an effort to save up the cash to get the other stuff done?
The Celtics are caught up in the initial hellscape of the second apron era, exacerbated by the aftermath of Jayson Tatum’s injury. There have been understandable moves that would have been made regardless of ownership. But at some point, they will have to emerge from this and put another contender on the floor. It won’t be long before we get the full picture of what this group is willing to do.
Even if Chisholm himself is willing to be a big spender, and even if he’s backed by Grousbeck, it’s fair to question whether this group has grown too large, and the future considerations too ambitious, for the rah rah “we don’t play for second” statements to hold true. There is a board of decision-makers, all of whom have votes and financial stakes that demand returns on investments. If the vision gets too grand, this could get out of control in a hurry.