“We’re fans who bought the team. We’re doing this for love,” said Grousbeck, sitting in the Celtics locker room last week flanked by Porzingis’s size 16 shoes and the pink sneaks of Jayson Tatum. “We’re doing this for Celtic pride, and we’re going to put everything we can into the team to win a banner, to win a championship.”
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Sure, all of this can sound hokey, but maybe you don’t know Wyc Grousbeck. (Apparently Mavericks star Luka Doncic said he did not after a courtside exchange during Sunday’s night game.)
Grousbeck is the kind of rich guy who is aware of his privilege. He can do anything, yet he doesn’t take himself too seriously. He went to Princeton and Stanford. He plays in two bands. His family life inspired an NBC sitcom, which he helped produce. He cofounded Cincoro Tequila with his wife and NBA legend Michael Jordan.
And in this particular moment, Grousbeck is the best thing going for Boston sports fans. We are relentless and notoriously unforgiving. It’s not enough that our teams win one championship; they need to be in contention every year. For all the many rings Patriots owner Bob Kraft and Red Sox principal owner John Henry have racked up, fans can be brutal if they sense ownership isn’t in it to win it. (Henry also owns the Globe.)
Right now, the hopes and dreams of this Title Town rest on Grousbeck, a 62-year-old former venture capitalist and son of a billionaire who in 2002 recruited two dozen investors — mostly local, including Bain Capital’s Steve Pagliuca and real estate mogul Robert Epstein — to pony up $360 million to buy the Celtics. Under Grousbeck and this ownership group, the Celtics raised their 17th banner in 2008 and are now playing in their fourth NBA Finals. The Celtics have lost money in other years too, and while winning a championship has its financial upsides, such as attracting more sponsorship revenue, that doesn’t always offset the high cost of acquiring talented players.
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The prior owners, the Gaston family, got off to a spectacular start with two championships in 1984 and 1986, then faded in the standings and largely into irrelevance through the ‘90s. Gone were the storied days of championship runs with Red Auerbach, Bill Russell, and Larry Bird. Fans pilloried the Gastons for their absentee ownership and their bottom-line approach.
By the time Grousbeck took the reins as lead owner, the Celtics couldn’t fill the seats at TD Garden. During those early years, he, Pagliuca, and the front office staff drove around Boston giving away the 3,000 tickets that went unsold at each game, handing them to doormen at hotels, teenagers on the streets, and even gas station attendants on their drive home.
The Celtics weren’t for sale when Grousbeck showed up at the New York City home of owner Paul Gaston. But Grousbeck asked what would be “a crazy number” to make Gaston change his mind. When he threw out $360 million — more than anyone had ever paid for an NBA franchise at that time — Grousbeck replied: “OK, you have a deal.”
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The agreement took all of three minutes.
It would be another three months before the deal was sealed; Grousbeck didn’t exactly have that kind of money lying around. He mortgaged his Weston home to cobble together a seven-figure, nonrefundable deposit. He went on a leave of absence from Highland Partners, where he invested in Internet and biotech startups, so he could focus on recruiting partners.
It wasn’t always an easy sell. Grousbeck recalled that some of his best prospects turned him down. Then he tried Pagliuca, a Weston neighbor who also had wanted to buy a sports team. When Pagliuca got the call, he showed up at Grousbeck’s doorstep in Celtics gear.
Hoops has always been Pagliuca’s passion; he played on the freshman team at Duke University, coached all four of his kids’ basketball teams, and built an indoor basketball court in his home. Crucially, Pagliuca proved instrumental in bringing in the deep pockets of Bain partners, including Paul Edgerley, to be part of the ownership team.
Grousbeck set the tone with his partners early on. The Celtics would not be run like a family business. His pitch: You’ve made your money elsewhere. We won’t lose your shirt, but ownership is about hoisting banner 17 and many more to come. They would need to spend to win.
“I don’t want your lunch money or your college fund. You’re all very well-to-do people. I want a small percentage of your net worth. You put it into the Celtics and alongside me, I will run it. But I will treat you all like partners,” he told them. “But this is not about a percentage return or anything like that. This is about winning championships . . . so we will be paid in enjoyment. We will be paid in parades.”
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Grousbeck caught the bug of owning a sports team from his father, Irving, who along with Amos B. Hostetter Jr., cofounded Continental Cablevision, one of the country’s first cable companies. Selling Continental made them both incredibly wealthy. Hostetter turned his attention to philanthropy with the Barr Foundation, while the elder Grousbeck became a professor at Stanford Business School and tried unsuccessfully for years to buy a Major League Baseball team.
With the Celtics, Irving Grousbeck finally got a piece of pro sports. Pagliuca thinks the key to the Celtics’ success has been Wyc Grousbeck’s background in venture capital and his in private equity, one that takes a long-term, patient approach.
“Many new owners come in and try to make a splash, and they’ll immediately go out and pay a lot of money for old players that make the team a little better, but it’s really hard to win the championship, unless you have a mix of old and young players,” said Pagliuca. “It’s just like a business. When you try to do like a get-rich-quick scheme, it doesn’t work. So you’ve got to draft, you’ve got to have training, you got to grind it out.”
But titles can be expensive. The Celtics are losing money, Grousbeck acknowledged, because the team has exceeded the NBA salary cap, triggering a luxury tax the league levies to encourage competitive balance. The Celtics are expected to shell out nearly $48 million in luxury tax next season, the third highest in the NBA, according to Spotrac. That number is likely to grow larger if the Celtics re-sign Tatum, whose contract is coming up for renewal.
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“We are losing money,” Grousbeck said. “We are unconcerned by that.”
And unlike many pro sports teams — including the Patriots and Red Sox — the Celtics do not own their arena, depriving ownership of another source of revenue. But no one’s crying poor. Forbes magazine values the franchise at $4.7 billion, the fourth most valuable in the NBA, though to see that money, Grousbeck and company would have to sell the team. Still, NBA owners are reportedly close to reaching a new $76 billion deal for the league’s broadcast rights over the next decade, which would bring them a big payday.
Grousbeck gives a lot of credit for the team’s consistent success to Danny Ainge, the former Celtics player he and Pagliuca hired as president of basketball operations in 2003 who laid the foundation for the current roster.
It was Ainge who hired Brad Stevens from Butler University to be head coach, and maneuvered to add Brown (number three draft pick in 2016), and Tatum (number three in 2017).
When Ainge retired in 2021, Stevens, became president of basketball operations. And when head coach Ime Udoka was suspended before the start of the 2022-23 season for an inappropriate relationship with a subordinate employee, one of Stevens’ hires, Joe Mazzulla, took over.
Ainge, who now runs basketball operations for the Utah Jazz, reflects fondly on his time with the Celtics.
“Wyc does a really good job of managing the owners. They were a joy to be around. Nobody’s ever a pain or frustrating to be around,” said Ainge. “They were great partners. They knew what they knew, and they knew what they didn’t know, and let us do our job.”
If anything, Grousbeck’s love of the Celtics can be contagious. On Friday night, an off night at the Garden between Game 1 and Game 2, he played in a blues-rock band at the Greatest Bar in the shadow of TD Garden, just because the sports bar owner thought it would add to the festivities of the Finals. As Grousbeck riffed on the electric guitar, dozens grooved to the music while an old Celtics game replayed on TV.
So how fun is it to be the Celtics owner?
“It’s even more fun than you think it is,” said Grousbeck with a wide smile.
Shirley Leung is a Business columnist and host of the Globe Opinion podcast “Say More with Shirley Leung.” Find the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and globe.com/saymore. Follow her on Threads @shirley02186
Shirley Leung is a Business columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com.
