Marc Lore, Alex Rodriguez win Timberwolves, Lynx arbitration case vs. Glen Taylor

Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez say they have emerged victorious in their long, bitter battle with Glen Taylor for ownership of the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves and WNBA’s Lynx.

“Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez today announced that the arbitration in the Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx ownership dispute was decided in their favor,” a statement provided to read. “The decision endorsed Lore and Rodriguez’s interpretation of the purchase agreement and confirmed that the contractually agreed timeline for Lore and Rodriguez to obtain NBA approval and complete their acquisition of the teams has not expired.”

A three-person arbitration panel issued its ruling on Monday, saying that Lore and Rodriguez were entitled to a 90-day extension last spring to complete their purchase of the teams. That means the partners will have the time they said the contract entitled them to so they can go through the league approval process to take control of the Wolves and Lynx.

Taylor agreed to sell the teams to Lore and Rodriguez in 2022 for $1.5 billion. At the time, the plan was for Lore and Rodriguez to gradually assume control of the team in three installments over three years. So far, Lore and Rodriquez have made two payments and played integral roles in shaping the direction of the franchises. They were preparing to make their final payment in March when Taylor called off the deal, saying Lore and Rodriquez did not complete their transaction on time.

Lore and Rodriguez argued that the contract entitled them to an extra 90 days because they were just waiting on final approval from the NBA. The arbitration panel agreed.

However, the panel’s decision does not grant Lore and Rodriguez immediate ownership of the teams. They will have to go through the league approval process, including a vote by the Board of Governors, before taking control. It is unclear how long that will take.

Lore and Rodriguez had been adamant throughout the process that they did everything they needed to do to complete the transaction. The contract called for any dispute to be resolved via arbitration and not through the court system.

“We are extremely pleased with today’s decision,” Lore and Rodriguez said in a joint statement. “We look forward to working with the NBA to complete the approval process and close this transaction so that we can turn our attention to winning championships in Minnesota for our incredible fans and the Twin Cities community.”

Shortly after the news was announced, Taylor released a statement on the ruling.

“Becky and I were disappointed by this 2-1 decision from the panel,” Taylor said. “We will review the decision thoroughly prior to making any further comment. We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Timberwolves and Lynx players, staff, and loyal fans for their support.”

What it means

This is vindication for Lore and Rodriguez, who told in March that it was “a slap in the face and much more personal than even just about the money” when Taylor announced that the deal was off.

The two maintained that Taylor was violating the terms of the contract when he nixed the deal and that they were entitled to an extension to finish their purchase. They said that Taylor’s motivation was nothing more than seller’s remorse after the team nearly doubled in value in the three years between their initial agreement and the brink of sale completion.

With two previous payments to Taylor for 36 percent of the teams, Lore and Rodriguez will cut a third check to purchase enough equity to graduate from limited partners to majority owners.

They have roughly $950 million in an escrow account ready to use to make their final payment. Lore and Rodriguez also must get 23 of the 30 owners to approve the sale.

Lore and Rodriguez are confident the steps they have taken will make the approval process a smooth one for the league. They have their financing in order, added heavyweight minority partners, including former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and have started to chart out solutions to long-term issues facing the franchise, including the aging Target Center and the crumbling regional sports networks across the NBA landscape.

The deal

In April 2021, Taylor announced that he had reached an agreement to sell the Wolves and Lynx to Lore, a startup maven who turned several ventures into vast wealth, and Rodriguez, the three-time American League MVP and 14-time All-Star, for $1.5 billion. But the deal had an interesting twist.

For years, Taylor had been looking for a partner who would come in as a minority owner, ride shotgun for a few years and then take over as the general partner. Most of the prospective buyers he had met with in the past wanted to take control immediately. But Lore and Rodriguez agreed to the arrangement. They were basketball outsiders, so it was framed as a chance for them to learn the league, be mentored by Taylor and get their finances together before taking full control.

The early days were promising. Taylor granted Lore and Rodriguez significant influence on the business and decision-making processes that minority owners typically do not have. Lore and Rodriguez recruited Tim Connelly away from Denver to lead the front office, made hires to the business side of the operation and were a regular presence around the team.

The plan was for Lore and Rodriguez to make the purchase in chunks called tranches, starting with an initial 20 percent purchase. They made a second payment in 2023 that brought their holdings to 36 percent (about $600 million in total value) and planned to purchase another 40 percent last year to take them to majority ownership. Taylor called off the deal last March, saying Lore and Rodriguez did not complete the transaction on time.

The dispute

When Taylor announced that he was keeping the Timberwolves and Lynx, he said Lore and Rodriguez did not have the money to make the final purchase.

“They had difficulty raising the money, I guess,” Taylor told last spring.

Lore and Rodriguez had to make a last-minute change in their financing when the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that was part of Lore and Rodriguez’s ownership group, had to withdraw because it could not meet NBA requirements to be part of the team. Lore and Rodriguez pivoted to Dyal Capital, a group already approved by the NBA and has stakes in three other teams.

Lore and Rodriguez said they did have the money in time and they submitted their financial documentation a week before the March 27 deadline. Taylor said that because the purchase was not finalized by that date, he had the right to cancel the deal.

Lore and Rodriguez said they were only waiting for league approval and pointed to a section in the purchase agreement that states their ability to complete the transaction “shall be automatically extended by an additional ninety days if all NBA Approvals or other required approvals of any Governmental Entity have not yet been obtained.”

“Under certain circumstances, the buyer could have been entitled to a limited extension,” Taylor said in March. “However, those circumstances did not occur.”

Lore and Rodriguez were adamant that they followed the contract, alleging that Taylor was backing out of the deal because the team is now worth close to $3 billion. The Wolves have also made three straight trips to the playoffs, including a run to the Western Conference finals last season, after only making it once in the previous 17 seasons.

“It’s about just old-fashioned greed,” Lore told in March. “We’ve created real value in the team over the last two and a half years, and he wants that value back and is willing to break the contract.”

The process

The purchase agreement called for any dispute to be resolved by mediation or arbitration.

The three-person arbitration panel — Kathleen Blatz, Joseph Slights III and Thomas Fraser — was agreed upon by both sides. Blatz was the first female chief justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court and retired in 2006. Slights was a Delaware Superior Court judge and Fraser has served as a Hennepin County District Court judge as part of a decades-long career in law in the Twin Cities.

They conducted hearings in November and had one more meeting with both sides on Jan. 10.

The contract calls for the arbitration ruling to be binding. Technically speaking, neither side can appeal. The loser could ask a federal court to vacate the ruling. That generally requires extreme measures for that to be a possibility, such as one side believing a member of the panel was compromised or that the panel acted outside of its authority.

Taylor is not expected to challenge the ruling, league sources told .

The outcome

Though Lore and Rodriguez are not yet in charge, technically, the ruling does provide some much-needed clarity after a years-long battle.

The two sides were dug into their respective positions so deeply that it cast a pall over the Timberwolves’ run to the conference finals last season and the Lynx advancing to the WNBA Finals in the summer. Team employees, including coaches, players, front-office members and business and marketing staff, spent the last year caught in the middle of a bitter tug-of-war, a situation that made roster management and long-term planning challenging and brought tension throughout the organization.

Now the messaging is clear. Lore and Rodriguez are coming down the home stretch for acquiring the team and, assuming all goes well with approval, will be charting the course forward for years to come.

Connelly can become a free agent this summer, and his close ties to Lore and Rodriguez made his future with the organization an open question while the battle was playing out.

Lore and Rodriguez have taken several steps over the last six months to try to make the approval process with the league as clean as possible. They have heard questions about their finances from the moment they first agreed to buy the team, and the team will have an $85 million luxury tax bill to pay at the end of the season thanks to a ballooning payroll.

However, they have told people around the organization that their financial situation is so strong that they plan to buy out the remaining 64 percent of the franchise equity. There were discussions early on in the process of Taylor remaining on board with a 20 percent holding.

“Financially, I’ve never been in a better place,” Lore said in March. “I’ve got hundreds of millions of dollars of liquid capital sitting in the bank ready to invest should it be necessary.”

They also have stated publicly that the goal is to build a privately financed arena to replace Target Center, the second-oldest building in the league.

Assuming they are approved by the league, the shift from the small-town, old-school ownership style of Taylor to the modern, aggressive approach favored by Lore and Rodriguez will be dramatic. They have worked hard to win the favor of the Wolves fan base that was initially skeptical of two people with no ties to Minnesota coming in to take over the Wolves and Lynx.

Their role in recruiting Connelly, the enthusiasm they showed on the sideline and the team’s overall success since they came aboard chipped away at fan skepticism. Over the last few months, it was clear that Lore and Rodriguez had won the public relations portion of their fight with Taylor in the eyes of the majority of fans.

Now they are on the brink of doing what few have accomplished: winning a knock-down, drag-out business battle with Taylor.

There might not be many changes to the basketball side of the operation under the new leaders. Lore and Rodriguez targeted Connelly before Taylor signed off on the lucrative package to lure him away from Denver. They also were supportive of the decision to give coach Chris Finch a contract extension during the playoffs last season.

For Taylor and his wife, Becky, it is the end of an era. Taylor bought the Wolves in 1994, saving them at the 11th hour from moving to New Orleans. He presided over the team when they drafted Kevin Garnett straight out of high school in 1995, then inadvertently triggered a lockout when he signed Garnett to a $126 million contract extension in 1997. Taylor also was suspended in 2000 for an under-the-table contract agreed with former No. 1 overall pick Joe Smith — a deal that also cost the Timberwolves several first-round draft picks.

For decades, the Wolves were one of the most unsuccessful teams in professional sports. They made the Western Conference finals in 2004 and then went 14 years before their next playoff appearance.

Things started to turn around when the Wolves chose Anthony Edwards with the No. 1 pick in the 2020 draft and brought in Finch to coach the team in 2021. Connelly’s addition in 2022 was the final piece to the puzzle, helping spur the run to the conference finals last season, just the second time the franchise has been out of the first round of the playoffs in 36 years in the league.

The Taylors were nightly fixtures at Target Center, sitting right next to the Wolves and Lynx bench to cheer for their teams. Glen Taylor was one of the most accessible owners in the league, weighing in publicly often on the state of his teams, what was happening in the league and where things were going right and wrong in Minnesota.

The Lynx won four championships under their watch and became one of the model franchises in the WNBA. Success in the NBA proved to be much more difficult.

The Wolves are 30-24 and in seventh place in the conference with hopes that improving health will make them capable of another deep playoff run this spring.

Taylor has been absent from home games since December after having hip surgery.

Finch, who learned of the ruling during his pregame news conference before a 128-107 loss to the Cavaliers in Cleveland, said the clarity provided Monday is “overall good for the club.”

“It hasn’t affected our basketball abilities, which has been the most important thing,” Finch said. “I think all the ownership parties have been super mindful of that. I know it’s been a long process with, you know, a lot of kind of angst on both sides.

“I’ve had a great relationship with all three owners. I’ve been super blessed to work here and they’ve been nothing but supportive in all their own individual ways and together at times.”

When asked if he believes the new ownership group of Rodriguez and Lore is committed to spending on a winner, Finch replied, “Yes, absolutely.”

— ’s Joe Vardon in Cleveland contributed to this report.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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