The final two home games of the Minnesota Timberwolves regular season should bring nothing but celebratory vibes.
The Wolves still have an outside chance to be the No. 1-seeded team in the Western Conference, will host Game 1 of their first-round playoff series for the first time in 20 years and are getting All-Star Karl-Anthony Towns back on the floor sooner than initially anticipated.
The players are completely locked in on the task at hand and the goal of advancing past the first round in the playoffs for just the second time in their 35-year history.
The rest of their organization has been dealing with turmoil while a once-planned transfer of ownership from Glen Taylor to Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez has gone up in flames, leading to a startlingly public fight between the two sides that has fans and team employees caught in the middle.
It is all expected to be in public view on Friday night when Lore and Rodriguez are expected to attend the game against the Atlanta Hawks, team sources told The Athletic. It will be the first time they have been back in the arena since the dispute began on March 28.
Heated allegations have gone back and forth and on the record. This week, comments from NBA commissioner Adam Silver and a pair of sourced reports kept the issue front and center as the Timberwolves (55-25) chase the top seed in the West.
Silver said the league will be staying out of the fight, viewing it as a dispute between a buyer and a seller that, per the purchase agreement, will go to mediation and arbitration to be resolved. But he did add some clarity to the situation when asked about Lore and Rodriguez saying that the only reason they did not close at the end of March was because they were awaiting league approval.
“The dispute is precisely that, as to whether they had acted within the window of the option that Glen Taylor had sold them,” Silver said at the board of governors meeting in New York this week. “That’s the very basis of the dispute. So that dispute will be resolved independent of the league office.”
Taylor claims that Lore and Rodriguez did not have the money on time and missed several benchmarks in the agreement before the March 27 deadline, thereby rendering their option to purchase the final 40 percent expired. The contract does call for a 90-day extension “if all NBA Approvals or other required approvals of any Governmental Entity have not yet been obtained,” but Taylor’s view is that does not apply because the option has expired.
“If they would have had the money on the 27th, the deal would have been all done and they would have had control,” Taylor told The Athletic on March 28, the day he announced that the sale was off. “But they didn’t.”
Documents reviewed by The Athletic show that Lore and Rodriguez did send signed financial commitment letters to the NBA on March 20. The documents cover the more than $600 million needed to purchase the final 40 percent of the Timberwolves and Lynx that would have graduated them from limited partners to controlling owners. As part of a three-step purchase agreement on a $1.5 billion valuation, Lore and Rodriguez had already purchased chunks in 2021 and ’23 that took them to 36 percent ownership.
However, proof of funds does not constitute full payment, and the circumstances surrounding the most recent capital raise could play a role in the arguments going forward.
At least a portion of their funds for the final piece did come fairly late in this process when Lore and Rodriguez had to pivot quickly after the Carlyle Group could not comply with NBA guidelines to participate in the purchase.
Lore and Rodriguez had been working for months with Carlyle as a major part of their plans, but Carlyle had to withdraw from consideration because of some potential conflicts of interest in the investment world. With Carlyle out, they moved to secure Dyal Capital, which had already been approved by the NBA, to help bridge the gap.
As Silver said,…
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