How Iger Got the Lakers

**John Aran** (0:04)
Congratulations, you made The Varsity, the podcast. My name is John Aran and I'm Puck's sports correspondent and the host of this pod. ESPN's Ramona Shelburne joins The Varsity today. Ramona broke the biggest sports business story of the year on Wednesday, that Bob Iger and Josh Kushner are buying the Lakers from Mark Walter for an unbelievable amount of money, $12.5 billion. We're going to spend a lot of time talking about that today, Sunday, August 16th. Now I wrote a story in my private email about that $12.5 billion price tag. The finance guys and the bankers that I talked to, they think team prices are going to keep going up, and that's because private equity and venture capitalists are getting more involved in buying teams. It's an exclusive club, and a lot of rich people want to get involved. But media executives are warning that these valuations are going too high, especially if they're based on future media revenue. The media business, after all, is challenged. It's contracting. It's different in LA, of course. The NBA is only one year into an 11-year media deal that pays out $76 billion. In sports in LA, it's going to pay the Lakers upwards of $200 million per year for the local media rights. As one media executive told me, it's going to be a great business for the next 10 years. After that, who knows? As for now, let's get to ESPN's Ramona Shelburne.
Ramona, first of all, thank you for joining the pod. What a week you had. You broke to me one of the most surprising stories.
I was sitting in LAX, the Los Angeles Airport, and I noticed on the Puck Slack channel, somebody was like, oh, Iger is buying the Lakers.
I wish there was a video camera on me because I think my jaw might have hit the floor with that.
I grew up in newspapers. I'm an old reporter. How did you get this story? How did it come about? Take us through your reporting process before we talk about what it means for the Lakers and for the NBA and all of that.

**Ramona Shelburne** (2:10)
This was a very interesting story in that, I think for the past three or four weeks, I had been trying to understand what was going on in the federal case against Mark Walter, who is the, I guess, the now former chairman. Well, I guess he's still the chairman of the Lakers until the sale goes through.
But I was trying to understand the DOJ case against him. I mean, it's hard as a sports reporter, we have to educate ourselves on tax law or medical issues or all sorts of things. I have this line, I'm like, I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on TV sometimes. So I was kind of digging into what was going on in the DOJ case. We had all finally come up for air a little bit from the season, and LeBron had finally made a decision, a little more bandwidth to start digging in on this. As I was calling people in the industry and in and around basketball, but also just in the business community and things like that to try to understand what was going on with Mark.
A lot of the people I was talking to help me understand that. I think that put me in a more unique position to break this.
You're looking in the right areas. And what I was trying to understand was essentially like, A, what were these charges against Mark, and where was this coming from? And it's very complicated. I still don't fully understand it. I was still in the process of calling lawyers and legal people who can help me understand it. But I think that I read headlines, and what was interesting is clearly Josh Kushner and Bob Iger do too, because it created a unique set of circumstances where they felt it was worth a call to Mark Walter to see if he'd be interested in selling. I want to be clear, no one that I had called said, Mark is going to need to sell. I never thought that was happening.
We were just trying to understand how big a deal is this? What does this entail? Wrap your head around even where this was. But people in that world were helpful. But it took me a minute to make headway in that. Then what night was it? What day is it today? I don't even know. Tuesday night, which is a funny night because my oldest was going back to school in the morning. We had gone to orientation on Tuesday, and then we were getting him ready for school and get to bed early and stuff. So I happened to get a call around 9, 9.3 and somebody said, are you sitting down? I go, what do you mean? I said, I think Mark might have sold the Lakers. I was like, wait, what?