Joe Tsai might hope to hand over the Nets to his family one day, a la George Steinbrenners.
But don’t ever expect him to be the face of the franchise, as bombastic as the late Boss, just in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx.
In three different comments since the Nets missed the playoffs, Tsai has made it clear he’s taking a long-term approach to running the Nets, but never intends to make it about the players and the team, not about him.
“I think being the owner of a sports team in a major American sports league is a rarefied existence because there are so few. There are 32 NFL teams, 30 NBA teams: That’s it. So you can end up treating yourself too seriously,” Tsai said recently at Yale, his alma mater. “So my first principle is don’t treat yourself too seriously. Don’t become the face of the franchise, because it’s not about you. Fans don’t care about you: They care about the players. They care about the star players.
“And the second thing about owning a sports franchise is who do you work for? You work for the fans. So you have to come in with that mindset, especially when you own a major sports team in a major city. It’s an institution. It’s not about you. It’s something that’s much much bigger than you and I feel like I’m a custodian of the team. I want to make our fans proud. So that’s my mindset.”
Ever since Tsai bought into the Nets — first as a minority owner, then taking control from Russian oligarch Mikal Prokhorov in 2019 — he has seen dizzying ups and downs, from adding Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, to the trade for James Harden, to the eventual breakup of that Big Three.
Now Nets fans want to know what his grand plan for the future is.
But three recent appearances – sitting with the head of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund in Oslo last month, talking at J.P. Morgan’s Global China Summit in Shanghai, and the aforementioned event at Tsai CITY, Yale’s center for creative Innovative Thinking – were about his role as founder and chairman of Alibaba.
Still, Tsai — clad in a vest promoting Sportico — reiterated he plans to be more of a quiet leader, which didn’t give any specifics on the Nets but implies general manager Sean Marks will be left to his own devices.
“There’s a portrayal of a leader, they come into a room, they suck up all the oxygen and everybody’s afraid of them. Then all of a sudden, your employees start to cater to what the boss likes, not what the customers really want. And that’s the worst leader in the world,” said Tsai. “So very low maintenance; you should disappear from the scene. What’s important are your customers, right? And if you’re in a crisis situation, try to solve the problem. Get your company out of crisis.”
The Nets have been in crisis since the Big Three broke up, going 32-50 and missing the playoffs for the first time since 2017-18.
This offseason — and whether or not they chase a star like Donovan Mitchell — will go a long way toward showing how Tsai plans to get this particular company out of their crisis.
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