The Minnesota Timberwolves have a new majority owner waiting in the wings, and the first real question is whether anything actually changes.
On Friday, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that Marc Lore sold the majority of his shares in the Timberwolves to Marc Stad, who was already part of the ownership group. Stad, the founder of San Francisco-based Dragoneer Investments, is now set to become majority owner pending league approval. His wife, Elisa, will serve as team Governor, while Stad stays heavily involved with Dragoneer.
That shift leaves the Wolves at an interesting crossroads, because the message around the transition is continuity. According to Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic, that’s the emphasis as the franchise moves from Lore to Stad.
And on paper, there’s plenty to support that idea. When the Wolves needed to go above the apron and pay the luxury tax during the ownership transition, they did.
The current offseason has also shown a willingness to spend a bit more when winning is part of the equation.
Still, ownership changes always come with a few hanging threads, and Lore’s situation is the biggest one.
Lore is also building Wonde, the New York-based food delivery company that has grown quickly over the last couple of years. He was in the middle of launching and developing that business around the time he and Alex Rodriguez agreed to buy the team from Glen Taylor, and he has always come off like a serial entrepreneur who doesn’t exactly sit still. During the first season of the ownership transition, Lore was a regular courtside presence and made a habit of taking off his shoes after Wolves wins.
But that changed as the legal battle over the team played out and arbitration with Taylor followed. Wonde began to take off, and this past July, Lore raised another round of funding at a $9 billion valuation. Over the last two seasons, he attended far fewer games than he once did.
That makes the timing of the sale hard to ignore. NBA ownership values are soaring, with the Trail Blazers sale this past season coming in at $4 billion compared with the $1.5 billion the current Timberwolves group paid. In that kind of market, it would make sense for someone in Lore’s position to think hard about whether this was the right moment to scale back.
Even with Stad taking over, though, there’s still a broader question about what kind of ownership footprint the Wolves will actually have. Lore had been the one with cash on hand in the group, and until NBA approval clears everything, the real test remains the same: what happens when the team has to navigate the various aprons?
So far, the philosophy has been pretty straightforward. Hire the right people and let them work.
That approach has shown up in the 10-year contract for CEO Matthew Caldwell, in making Tim Connelly one of the highest-paid executives in basketball, and in the rebuilding of the leadership structure. The Wolves have largely operated with a hands-off style.
But even under that model, the franchise made one massive swing when it brought in Rudy Gobert, a move that reshaped the roster and launched a new era, even if the fit was clunky. The league is full of examples of ownership influencing that kind of decision, and the Wolves don’t exactly have a treasure chest of trade assets to work with.
So the continuity line may hold for now. The bigger question is whether a new majority owner will eventually want to put a personal stamp on the organization, whether that comes through a move on the floor or one off it.
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