MONEY NO ISSUE
Billionaire owner says a few million bucks won’t get in the way of championship chase
Rockets owner Fertitta won’t let few million get in way of NBA title
On his road to billions in assets, Tilman Fertitta ran over, through and around whatever was in his way.
Forget “Failure is not an option.” Fertitta seemingly locked in on the thought that “Success is the only goal.”
Sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, he came across a car collection in his hometown that was one of the notable in the state of Texas, featuring a some of the muscle cars of his youth.
Oh, he wanted it.
But Fertitta played the negotiating game hard, pushing the seller of the $2-plus-million collection over “a few hundred thousand dollars.”
He figured the seller would circle back to him. While he waited, the collection was sold off in pieces for roughly the price Fertitta should have bought it for.
That the value of the collection would have quadrupled by now isn’t what stings Fertitta about the deal that wasn’t a deal.
“That taught me a lesson,” Fertitta said. “If you really want something, don’t worry about a few million dollars.
“And that goes for any basketball player I want, too. If they think enough of us to want to play here, we’re sure gonna go get ’em.”
That last part came with a chuckle, of which the 63-year-old Rockets owner shared quite a few in an interview for “Texas Sports Nation In-Depth,” which debuts at 7 p.m. Sunday on AT&T SportsNet Southwest.
Fertitta laughed — yes, out loud — at the recurring criticism of his ownership style and the team’s approach to the NBA salary cap.
Fertitta, CEO Tad Brown and general manager Daryl Morey say avoiding the punitive NBA luxury tax simply isn’t and never will be a priority. They have said that dozens of times since Fertitta bought the team, and dozens more since a February trade for Robert Covington resulted in a nice budget cut that moved the team into a lower tax bracket, as it were.
But the reproach encircles the franchise like mosquitoes and rainwater.
“We don’t make basketball decisions of two or three million dollars based on the luxury tax,” Fertitta said. “Our whole budget this year was to be in the luxury tax.”
Morey says Fertitta hasn’t given him a directive to stay below the tax, and the in-house discussion is the Rockets are almost certain to be on the wrong side of the tax line next season in pursuit of a championship.
The Rockets do have a better record than all four teams slated to pay the luxury tax this season. Unless the rules are amended because of the unique circumstances, a host of teams are likely to top the line next season thanks to the damage done to NBA revenues by the pandemic.
Les Alexander, who owned the Rockets before Fertitta, once openly admitted that the luxury tax was a hard salary cap for him. Eventually, the Rockets surpassed it twice during his ownership, once because the Pistons returned Donatas Motiejunas for a refund.
With James Harden, who Saturday was named a finalist for the league’s Most Valuable Player award for the fifth time in six seasons, in his peak and Russell Westbrook, also a former MVP, showing no signs of slowing down, the Rockets should be contenders for the next few seasons.
Fertitta says now is not the time for frugality.
“We want to be champions,” Fertitta said. “You win a championship, it’s probably worth $30-$50 million dollars the following year to you from sponsorships and people wanting to buy tickets and everything else. So you want to spend the money to win a championship.”
But does he have the money to spend?
More laughter.
Fertitta is irritated by radio talk, Internet chatter and blogs that suggest fluctuation in his casino and restaurant businesses — the rake at the Golden Nugget and how many ribeyes are sold at Morton’s — will hurt the Rockets.
“That’s bad journalism,” Fertitta said. “That’s bad information to the public. OK?
“I’m gonna do whatever it takes to put the best team out there for the Rockets. And what happens over here has nothing to with what goes on at the Houston Rockets. It has nothing to do with it.”
That said, Fertitta estimates that in the first six months of 2020 he took a $1 billion hit from the pandemic.
Yes, that’s billion with a “B.” “But that’s why it’s good to have a few billion,” said Fertitta, who ranked No. 190 on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans in 2019 with a net worth of $4.9 billion.
One reason Fertitta is in such a good mood is that his basketball management team tells him the Rockets could pull off an NBA championship run inside the league’s coronavirus bubble in Orlando.
Morey says with four regularseason games remaining, the Rockets feel good about what they have done since the restart to the NBA season.
“There are still some ifs when it comes to us winning a championship, but there are fewer ifs now than we’ve had,” Morey said.
As of Saturday afternoon, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gave the Rockets a 9 percent chance at winning the NBA title, fourth-best in the NBA. Houston has won three of four games in the bubble, including wins over the Bucks and Lakers, two of the teams with better odds.
A longtime fan, a season ticket holder since the ’80s and once a minority owner, Fertitta at times sounds more like a Red Rowdie believer than a heads-are-gonnaroll-if-we-don’t-win owner.
He can be convincing.
“I pay all these guys a lot of money to make the right decisions,” Fertitta said. “I have all the faith in the world and the decisions they’re making. I have all the faith in the world the way Mike (D’Antoni) is coaching the team. As long as we’re in the playoffs and we set ourselves up for a chance.
“Nobody thought Toronto was going to win the championship last year. It takes a lot to win a championship. That’s why the great LeBron ( James), where he could carry a team, in all his years only has, what, three championships? It just takes luck to win a championship.
“So you just want to set yourself up. And I think with the basketball ops people I have and the players we have, that’s what we’re doing. You set yourself up for success.”
And for Fertitta, success has long been the only goal.