The NBA playoffs are in full swing right now, but the Golden State Warriors, the league's most successful team in the past decade, lost the play-offs early and faded out of the fan's eye. As the owner of the team, Lacob has spent nearly $400 million this season, including $170 million in luxury tax alone, but in exchange for the players going home early to fish. Many people complained about Lacob's grievances, believing that the input-output ratio was too low. So is there anyone more wronged than Lacob in the current alliance?
Not to mention, there really is, his name is Ishbia, the owner of the Phoenix Suns.
At present, the Suns are still competing in the playoffs, but they are 0-3 behind the Minnesota Timberwolves in the big score, which basically means that the players can order fishing rods online. Because in the history of the NBA, there has never been a team that has completed a comeback in such a desperate situation.
In other words, the Suns' result this season is a first-round tour.
So what did Ishbia pay for this first round of travel? The answer is $258 million, of which about $191 million was spent on salaries and nearly $67 million in luxury tax.
In terms of overall input, Ishbia is much less than Lacob, but why is he more wronged than the latter?
Then we have to talk about output, although the Warriors have a good performance, but Golden State is a big ball city, and with a gold-sucking beast like Curry, no matter how much investment you make, you can earn it back. Considering the Warriors' four championships in the past 10 years and the team's rising valuation, this is nothing more than a pullback from the ultra-high returns of the past.
What about the Suns, before 2021, they were still a super fish belly who missed the playoffs for 10 consecutive seasons, and it was not until the middle of the 2020-21 season that Paul was brought in, and the team's record improved by leaps and bounds, ranking second in the West with a 51-21 record that season, and eliminating the Lakers, Nuggets and Clippers all the way to the Finals in the playoffs.
Although it lost to the Milwaukee Bucks 2-4 in the end, the Suns team felt like an NBA championship-level team.
In the summer of 2022, team owner Savor was suddenly exposed to a negative incident of workplace bullying, and it took him only a few months to make the decision to sell the team. Ishbia, who has a passion for sports, walked into his office with a sack full of money that sold for $4 billion.
As a businessman, Ishbia is undoubtedly successful, he is the president and CEO of the United Wholesale Mortgage Company, and his worth is worth as much as $6.9 billion, but his decision to buy the Suns is clearly not from a business perspective.
Ishbia was a point guard back in college, and he was one of the champions at Michigan State University in 2000. In a sense, Ishbia is paying for his basketball feelings, but in retrospect, it seems that he has encountered the biggest "pig killing handicap" in NBA history.
In 2004, Sarver only spent $400 million when he bought the Suns, and the team was at a low point for many years, and then took the opportunity to hype up the valuation, and sold it at a high point to cash out.
In any case, Ishbia's love for basketball is absolutely real, in order to achieve results for the team, he invested a lot of money, and on the first day of his tenure, he pushed the team to bring in one of the hottest forwards in the league - Durant. To that end, the team sent Bridges, Cameron Johnson, and four first-round picks.
But the attitude of ALL IN in Libya, which did not bring corresponding rewards to the team, but the record went all the way down, and then he once again launched the dollar ability, sent away the aging Paul, used up all the second-round picks in his hand, and won the three-time All-Star guard Beal. When this deal happened, it almost caused a sensation around the world, and the offensive trident combination of "Durant + Beal + Booker" led to infinite reverie!
Not only that, but he was still very decisive in the face of the discord with the general, first firing head coach Monty Williams, and then sending away the team's interior champion Ayton in the offseason.
In addition to the $258 million spent this season, they will also enter next season with a salary of up to $206 million, the league's first, and the offensive trident of Durant, Beal, and Booker alone will have a salary of up to $300 million in the next two years.
If this switch is the championship, it will be nothing to say, but the problem is that the team is facing the embarrassment of a 0-3 series. In the third game of the series, Iliba sat on the scene to supervise the game, thinking that it would boost the team's morale and pull one back at home, but he was still greeted with a fiasco without resistance.
At the end of the third quarter, the director captured him with the camera, only to see him with a sad face and confused eyes. Maybe he's thinking about how to spend the summer without a single draft pick, or maybe he's thinking about how a shrewd business wizard like himself came to be the way of Savor's old boy?