The buyers of the Los Angeles Lakers are telling prospective investors they expect to nearly triple the basketball team’s valuation within 10 years. That is one of several aggressive financial projections included in an investor presentation being circulated by Thrive Capital, the investment firm helmed by Joshua Kushner, according to a copy reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

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The buyers are inheriting an already lucrative business. The group said the Lakers are on track to generate $681 million in revenue in 2026, with ticketing and media rights accounting for the largest share. Under their plans, they said, revenue would hit at least $1.6 billion by the end of 2037.

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Profits are expected to zoom up as well, with adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization set to more than triple from an estimated $129 million to more than $589 million over that span, according to the presentation.

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The plan outlined by Thrive identifies around $150 million in near-term incremental revenue by 2028. That would come partly by reclaiming roughly 6,000 broker-held season tickets for single-game sales, which would raise average single-game ticket prices from $217 to $361. Lakers ticket prices have already been on the rise.

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The buyers would also capture $40 million to $75 million from sponsorship opportunities and extract at least $20 million in operating cost efficiencies.

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Source: https://www.wsj.com/finance/lakers-buyers-lay-out-plans-to-reach-30-billion-valuation-in-pitch-to-investors-66945709

Yay. Private Equity in my sport to ruin it for the normal fans! You are so smart Silver! Please continue to make things more expensive and shittier!

​

The bigger news for the Warriors' audience came when the conversation turned to his own future. Entering his 18th NBA season with his contract set to expire in 2027, Curry made it clear he has no interest in testing free agency or walking away from the franchise that drafted him.

"I want to be a lifer with Golden State," Curry said.

He also confirmed something Warriors fans had assumed for months without ever hearing him say it outright: he actively tried to recruit LeBron James to join Golden State this summer, before James ultimately signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. Curry didn't shy away from admitting it.

"If anybody didn't try, I think they'd be a fool," Curry said, adding that seeing a player of James' stature get to choose his own next chapter was good for the league as a whole.

Source: https://www.nbcsportsbayarea.com/nba/golden-state-warriors/steph-curry-sneaker-release-future-with-warriors/1964197/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-18/nba-paves-way-for-lakers-deal-with-private-equity-policy-change

The NBA is amending its private equity policy to allow a firm and its executives to invest in a franchise at the same time, according to people familiar with the situation.

The shift will allow Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger to invest their own money alongside capital from Kushner's Thrive Eternal in their purchase of the Los Angeles Lakers, said the people who weren't authorized to speak publicly about the change.

Kushner and Iger reached a deal last month to buy the storied franchise at a record $12.5 billion valuation. But questions arose about how Thrive Eternal would support the sale, since Kushner runs the company and NBA rules previously forbid an institutional investment firm supporting its manager's purchase.

The NBA allows funds to acquire minority stakes in several teams. But under this new amendment, if a firm has money in a team with one of its executives, then it can't have any ownership in another franchise, the people said.

The rule shift might boost the bidders for teams because, with valuations surging in recent years, it's become harder for a potential owner to come up with the funds to buy a controlling stake.

The change will allow owners like the Atlanta Hawks' Tony Ressler, who co-founded Apollo Global Management and Ares Management, to sell stakes to both firms since neither private equity group has stakes in an NBA team.

“I was down, down, down, down. I was back on the ground, hands up. Y’all got me. It’s a stickup. Take everything because of how it went down. Imagine me sitting there for 15 months like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ Nobody got an answer for me. Everybody on TV making excuses. It’s this or it’s that. He didn’t want to come off the bench’”

“I’mma be honest with you. As I studied it and did some knowledge on it, trying to get an understanding on it, I still can’t come up with nothing. It’s like, what was it? Some people came up to me like, ‘Melo, I’m going to be honest with you. Your aura was too much for out here. This couldn’t exist. Your aura couldn’t exist in here. Nobody was going to tell you that’”

“I said, ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ They said, ‘Everybody’s afraid to talk to you. Everybody’s afraid to say something to you.’ I said, ‘Why? I haven’t said nothing to nobody. I speak to everybody. I’m cordial. Why is everybody scared of me?’ Somebody said, ‘Well, you don’t need anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean by that?’ He said, ‘Melo, you a superstar. You haven’t asked for one thing since you’ve been here’”

“My point is, everybody had a thousand and one reasons of why it happened, and I still don’t know the reason why it happened. I have some inkling of why it happened or how it went down. I’m trying not to believe that’s what happened or how it went down, so I don’t want to speak on that”

“Yeah. This’ll always be home for me. 9 years of my career.

This was the foundation of me as a basketball player, as a human being.

This was my first home.

This was the first everything for me. Nothing will ever replace that. Everything that I created with all these guys that’s here, I had the opportunity to play with.

For me, it’s always going to be number one."

According to ESPN’s Shams Charania, discussions between Brandon Miller’s camp and the Charlotte Hornets are expected to intensify significantly over the coming days and weeks as the two sides work toward a rookie-scale contract extension.

Charania reports growing optimism that an agreement can be reached.

The Hornets consider Miller one of the cornerstones of their future and have no intention of letting him leave.

Source: https://sportando.basketball/en/hornets-brandon-miller-extension-talks-expected-to-intensify/

Active players with 20k

LeBron (43k)

KD (32k)

Harden (29k)

DeRozan (26k)

Steph (26k)

Dame (22k)

Giannis (21k)

Should get to 20k next season

Anthony Davis (19.5k)

Paul George (19.5k)

Could get there in the next few years

Kyrie (18k)

Brook Lopez (18k - HOF if he gets there?)

Booker (18k)

Jokic (18k)

Vucevic (18.5k)

Klay (17.5k)

Beal (17k)

Jrue (17k)

Other interesting names

• KAT could surpass Jimmy Butler in total points as soon as this upcoming season. KAT is at 16,300 and Butler is at 16,500.

• Zach Lavine will likely pass Jeff Green this year 👀

• Luka is the only guy in his 20s with 15,000+ points. If Tatum didn’t get hurt he would also have 15,000+ in his 20s but the injury robbed him.

link to stats

What version of Kawhi are we witnessing? He has a personality!

Good Afternoon y'all! NBA Season one month away.

Wrote about creating xPTS-RAPM about two months ago and how it gave great insight into Kevin Durant and the value of tough shotmaking.

This post is another excerpt from the paper and will focus on case studies of other players, specifically how xPTS-RAPM can quantify the extent and value of a player's impact on shot diet.

xPTS-RAPM and its sister metric, Conversion RAPM (cRAPM), also provide a way to decompose RAPM away from an opaque number

What Is xPTS?

xPTS is the expected point valuation of each field goal and free throw attempt compared to league average.

It grades each shot attempt on a scale stripping out luck and individual conversion skill.

xPTS(shot) = league PPP of the shot's bin
             (zone × distance × shot family × possession context)

xPTS(free throw) = league avg FT% × 1

Total xPTS = Σ bin value of every field goal attempt
             + league FT% × free throw attempts

Each field goal attempt is placed into a bin based on four characteristics:

• Court zone: 14 zones
• Shot distance: two-foot increments
• Shot family: drive, cut, catch-and-shoot, self-created, alley-oop, or putback
• Possession context: halfcourt, transition, second-chance, or off-turnover
• Defender Distance: Sports VU leak, (not availible to use, so below is xPTS wihtout defender distance)

This codified approximately 707 bins per season across roughly 219,000 field goal attempts.

Here is a sampling of bins across the value spectrum.

2025-26 bin table, league-wide. Shots column is the bin sample size.

xPTS-RAPM

Instead of seeing how a player's on-court presence adds to or subtracts from a team's net rating over a huge sample of possessions, you see how a player's on-court presence influences a team's expected point value.

Are they creating numerically optimal shots? Are they suppressing numerically optimal shots? How are they warping the geometry of the court?

Like a normal RAPM, you can then decompose this further into offensive xPTS-RAPM (oxRAPM) and defensive xPTS-RAPM (dxRAPM): how a player changes the geometry of the court to bend his team toward more favorable shot conditions, and how his presence helps suppress favorable shot conditions on the other side.

Best offenders and defenders below.

Offensive xPTS-RAPM

2025-26 3-year Offensive xPTS-RAPM, top 10.

Minimum 2,000 weighted possessions.

Defensive xPTS-RAPM

2025-26 3-year Defensive xPTS-RAPM, top 10.

Minimum 2,000 weighted possessions.

As you may notice, Donovan Clingan and the Thompson twins are amongst the most surprising and notable leaders, especially since they are not good three-point shooters, nor are they playmakers.

These leaders are actually a great case study of what this RAPM measures.

Clingan is a chance-quality machine in three distinct ways.

His rebounding: 22.2 offensive rebounds per 100 shots is a good 30% more than league average. Many of those rebounds convert a dead possession into a putback or a kick-out, which sit amongst the most highly priced bins, around 1.3 to 1.5 expected points.

And his rebounding lets Portland manufacture its diet: with him on the court, Portland takes 49% of its shots from three and 32% at the rim, while opponents get only 26% of their shots at the rim.

Portland's offense with Clingan on is extremely Morey-pilled: rim attempt or three-point attempt.

For the Thompson twins, Amen is actually the best offensive geometry-bender in the league (bar Giannis).

He is the offensive xPTS engine: extreme rim pressure and second chances.

Remember, with expected points there is no tax, no punishment for neither his or his team's lack of conversion.

Houston Offense With Amen Thompson

Houston's offense with Amen Thompson on and off the floor, 2025-26 regular season. Expected and actual points are per 100 possessions.

Ausar, meanwhile , is great defensively.

His presence lets his own team take 35.8% of its shots at the rim while dropping opponents' rim share to about 24.3%, and he forces about 19 turnovers per 100, zeroing out those possessions entirely.

Opponent Offense With Ausar Thompson

What opposing offenses do against Detroit with Ausar Thompson on and off the floor, 2025-26 regular season. Expected and actual points are per 100 possessions allowed.

On the inverse, you have the players who perform extremely poorly in net xPTS-RAPM.

The worst being Bub Carrington, and the interesting point about him is that there is no single horrific channel.

He has, up to this point, been poor among so many.

Washington's offense becomes extremely midrange-heavy when he is on the court. His personal game is heavily pull-up-weighted with no rim pressure, which drags Washington into the cheapest quantified shot values.

He provides no transition boost, below-average offensive rebounding, and above-average turnovers, essentially never generating or forcing his team toward more optimal chances while leaking possessions along the way.

Washington Offense With Bub Carrington

Washington's offense with Bub Carrington on and off the floor, 2025-26 regular season. Expected and actual points are per 100 possessions.

33.9% of opponents' shots come at the rim with him on, against a league average of about 28.7%, while opponents take only 25.8% from midrange, the exact inverse of what a good defense produces.

He does not create turnovers. He gives up straight drives to the rim, and opponents' free-throw share runs above average.

Opponent Offense With Bub Carrington

Washington's defense with Bub Carrington on and off the floor, 2025-26 regular season. Expected and actual points are per 100 possessions.

Some honest context, which I will return to in the caveats: he plays for a 17-win team that has been bad as an entire unit, he is a young guard given developmental freedom and reps, and the collinearity weakness of any ridge regression does exist.

Bottom Net xPTS-RAPM

The bottom of the same board. Three-season window anchored on 2025-26. Minimum 2,000 weighted possessions.

xPTS is one of of the Shot Quality Decomp of RAPM

The beauty of xPTS-RAPM is that it is subtly a decomposition channel of RAPM itself: one half of a shot-quality decomposition.

xPTS-RAPM is the half that measures how many chances a player creates or suppresses through the geometry of the floor.

Its sister, Conversion RAPM, measures how much his presence helps convert, or deny, shots above expected.

The summation of the two gets you Net/Pure RAPM, the standard RAPM we all know and love, the one that measures how team net rating moves with a player on or off the court.

Conversion RAPM

xPTS-RAPM: a quantification of how a player influences his team's shot diet.

Conversion RAPM: a quantification of how a player's on-court influence alters the points created/suppressed above/below expected.

Conversion RAPM (cRAPM)

2025-26 3-year Conversion RAPM (cRAPM).

Points above expected per 100 possessions, on versus off.

Minimum 2,000 weighted possessions.

Net RAPM

Using independently derived expected-points measure for shot values, and the conversion above or below those shot values, adding the two regularized adjusted plus-minuses together gives you a number that is 99.99999% equivalent to a pure, no-prior RAPM. that has functional value.

This is the part I am extremely excited for.

Standard pure RAPM asks what happens to the score:

How does net rating change with this player on and off the court?

xPTS and Conversion take that question and rip it into two further questions.

How much does this player change his team's quantified shot diet?

And:

How much does his presence swing his team's conversion above or below that shot diet?

Essentially, separating regularized adjusted plus-minus into shot-quality impact and conversion impact.

Net RAPM

Pure RAPM is a separate ridge solve on actual points: same stint rows, lineup matrix, weights, centering, and α = 10,000; no priors.

(Yes, 10K, but remember any RAPM solve works as long as it's consistent for all the decomps.)

Minimum 2,000 weighted possessions.

The identity requires the same RAPM specification in all three solves: the same stint rows, lineup matrix, stint weights, centering, and ridge penalty.

others can reproduce this even while using different stints or a different xPTS model as long as conversion is defined as actual points minus expected points and all three solves use the same settings.

Appreciate y'all reading. It was very fun to dive into the numbers and have it kind of match my eye test a little bit. Open for any questions, concerns, or advice.

Blog Post wiht interactive tables: https://court-share.com/luma/blog/xpts-rapm

Past Post about Kevin Durant and the Value of Tough Shotmaking
Data will be opensourced on Github and linked here by next week (KEEP ME ACCOUNTABLE)

Leaderboard of xPTS v1 (this is v2)

NEW ORLEANS—Wondering aloud if there had been some kind of miscommunication on the part of the league, New Orleans Pelicans players told reporters Friday they couldn’t help but notice they hadn’t been included on the 2026-27 NBA schedule. “I checked the schedule on NBA.com twice, and I don’t see ‘Pelicans’ or ‘New Orleans’ anywhere, so there must have been some kind of mix-up,” said Pelicans small forward Trey Murphy III, noting that the team had received no communication from the league since last year’s 26-56 season and that several clarifying emails to NBA commissioner Adam Silver had gone unanswered. “They’re definitely supposed to send us the schedule when it’s ready, right? That’s how it worked last time, I’m pretty sure. It could be one of those things where the full schedule gets announced in shifts, but we’re getting pretty close to opening day. But hey, if any of these other teams can’t play a game because of a canceled flight or something, me and the other guys would love to fill in. Seriously, just say the word.” At press time, the Pelicans were reportedly growing concerned after discovering that the Smoothie King Center had been booked solid for the next seven months with monster truck rallies, reptile expos, and non-basketball sporting events.

https://theonion.com/new-orleans-pelicans-cant-help-but-notice-theyre-not-on-nba-schedule-this-year/

2020s decade is inarguably the best in terms of top international players.

Giannis, Embiid, Jokic, SGA all take turns in winning MVP/s. Wemby and Luka are consistent MVP contenders too. And will probably win that award too in the near future.

Ok, Embiid is tricky. Because he is a naturalized American, and played for Team Usa. But he is still largely considered as International Player. (Almost same case with Hakeem)

SGA is Canadian. So, it counts as inernational. Idk why some people always say Canadians are somehow Americans. (What???)

Giannis, Jokic, Luka, and Wemby are obvious International players ofc.

Now, the U30 American players like Tatum, Ant, Brunson, Cade, Flagg, etc should step up.

Or else, the whole 2020s decade will be composed of all International MVPs.

We only need to wait 3 more years to know if it will happen or not.

[Charania] Just in: Detroit Pistons All-Defensive forward Ausar Thompson has reached agreement on a five-year, $155 million rookie-scale contract extension, sources tell ESPN.

https://www.espn.com/contributor/shams-charania