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The Pistons had lost Bill Davidson, the owner for 37 years, a couple of years prior. He really was very critical to the franchise. Culturally, the Pistons are a deep organization with a lot of pride. But when Bill passed away, they lost their way a little bit. His family was very clear they hadn’t stepped into Bill’s shoes and that someone needed to. The Davidsons and I developed a very trusting relationship. I went back to Detroit and saw them many times.
Bill’s son, Ethan, and his widow, Karen, didn’t just want to turn it over to anybody. That relationship was vital to ultimately working together to get the deal done. As my team and I studied PS&E, what really hit me is this is not just a sports team. It’s a reasonably complicated entertainment company. It has a stadium it owns that holds many events, two other concert centers, and it owns a little imaging company. The venues really are incredible assets, and other buyers weren’t really paying attention to them. Once I saw all the pieces I said, “Geez, this is right up our alley. It engages all the things we do in the LBO business.” While others might have looked at the fan base and the economy here and been concerned, I wasn’t that worried.
Just like any target company, we look at how the assets should be working together. For concerts we have to make sure we’re constantly out of the box. Detroit’s got such a good base to work with—big corporations, music, the storied franchise. We’re looking forward to mixing it up in the city and generating good activity.
What’s unbelievable to me is the impact I can make given that I’m from Detroit, I know the business, I have a reasonable understanding of sports and people. This is a community asset. If all I do is make a few bucks and the community isn’t happy, that’s not good. The beauty of this is that the fans are the customers. If you buy a company, you have to make the customers happy or they’re going to leave you. Winning brings folks in—so we have to figure out how to win, how to compete. I know this city needs that.
Bold section sounds good to me!
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This is our first move into professional sports, both for the firm and for Tom Gores, and we approach this like any other investment that we make. We will really try to understand best practices and be forward-thinking as opposed to reactionary. Getting heavily into statistical analysis seems quite natural to us.
Sounds good to me :)
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The advanced stats just ought to be a part of your tool kit. It’s equally important to have really solid basketball people, and Joe Dumars has obviously been in this league for 25-plus years now. He has tremendous basketball intellect. But we’re just trying to make sure we use every tool in that took box, even if it means you just do a better job at finding that 8th, 9th or 10th guy.
From the 2 links these quotes came from it seems like the plan right now is to: