How Steve Pagliuca used Bane’s playbook to create a championship

(Bloomberg) — Few team owners are having a better 2024 than Steve Pagliuca. Less than a month after an all-night party celebrating B.C.’s unexpected EuroLeague title in Atlanta, the longtime private equity dealmaker hoisted the NBA trophy as the Boston Celtics won their second under the group’s banner champion.

“I’m still pinching myself,” Pagliuca said on the latest episode of “The Deal” with Alex Rodriguez and Jason Kelly. So how did he do it?

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Pagliuca was part of the team led by Wyc Grousbeck, who purchased the Celtics for $360 million in 2002 and immediately began work on restoring the iconic franchise, which had not won it all since 1986. Team. Both men came from the investment world and knew they had a good team. Undervalued assets. Pagliuca, 70, built his fortune at Bain Capital, a private equity firm founded by the famed consulting firm. He has a script ready.

“The first thing we did was conduct a Bain study of key targets,” Pagliuca said. As good consultants do, they boiled it down to three things: building a championship team, creating a more fan-friendly environment and treating it as a community asset.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done. This takes time. Pagliuca said the Celtics owners studied the league and the team and found that if the new owner didn’t win a championship within the first five years, they would never win a championship. In 2008, at the end of Pagliuca’s fifth season, the Celtics broke a decades-long drought. “We just got into trouble,” he said.

The latest championship 16 years later shows just how difficult it is to win consistently in the modern NBA (even though it makes the Celtics the winningest team in league history). Grusbeck and Pagliuca were at the beginning of a wave of activist owners trained on Wall Street and corporate America. Now, this backdrop has become the norm and has made the league more competitive. Today, the Celtics’ opponents include the Atlanta Hawks (owned by Ares Capital founder and chairman Tony Ressler), the Phoenix Suns (owned by UWM Holdings chairman and CEO Matt Ishbia) , the Philadelphia 76ers (Apollo Management co-founder Josh Harris and longtime Blackstone executive David Blitzer) and the Los Angeles Clippers (former Microsoft CEO Steve Ball Steve Ballmer).

Ballmer is a leader among owners who have invested heavily in facilities and the fan experience. Pagliuca says it’s a harbinger that his new high-tech Intuit Dome in Los Angeles is the envy of not only NBA teams, but teams across the sports world.

“We are at the beginning of a revolution, and as technology evolves, things are only going to get better and better,” he explains. “It will be an incredible thing and stimulate the development of other sports venues.”

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