When he first bought the woeful Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban knew he had to make noise to draw attention and change the culture of the franchise. So he brought in an aging but always entertaining Dennis Rodman. It sent a message that things would be different, and a young owner would do what he needed to do to set a culture and make basketball in Dallas more relevant than it ever was. Some ideas worked, some didn’t but eventually the Mavs won a title and created enough innovative disruption to make their owner and their team’s business a must follow, while making their games a “must do” in a city and state where football has and always will be king.
Similar types of culture change usually happen when suffering franchises take on new ownership. The New Jersey, now Brooklyn, Nets would do anything to sell a ticket and get attention during their toughest days in and around the Meadowlands, finding “new innovations” every game to try and drum up support. The New York Islanders took to finding a tattoo artist to draw eyeballs, and across the country “new ideas” to create attention, some good, some bad always seem to be essential to any new regime looking to stir the pot, create interest and obviously find the bottom line on the rise.
One of the most interesting changes in sport has been going on in Sacramento, and it is different not because of the disruptive mentality going on with the team, but it’s because of the forward-thinking and civic mindedness happening off the court. The story of Vivek Ranadivé rise to the ownership circle in the NBA has been documented in a host of places in the past year since he came almost from nowhere not just to buy the team, but to keep it in Sacramento instead of the more popular move of taking the franchise to the lucrative market of Seattle. Ranadivé, an Indian immigrant who grew up loving cricket only came to basketball because of his love of analytics and the theories he put forth coaching his undersized daughter’s basketball team later in life. Highly successful and always forward-thinking, his business acumen in Silicon Valley, along with ample cash, gave him both the to help Mayor Kevin Johnson fight an uphill battle to rescue a team that had bottomed out as a business. Now Ranadivé is seen as a savior, and new things are on the horizon for the team.
This is not the first time that ownership has ridden into the California capitol to turn the franchise around. The Maloof family did much of the same, injecting fun and lots of dollars into the organization while filling then-ARCO Arena. However the lack of a new building put a damper on the Kings business, and the family interest in the business fizzled, along with the fan base. Now there is new owner with deep pockets, how will it be different, other than the new arena that is on the horizon for the team.
It really is different this time because of the culture of innovation that Ranadivé’s business team appears to be fostering. While many teams, the mavericks among them, are looking more and more to use analytics to measure in-court performance, the Kings have embraced every form of analysis to try and give the coaching and training staff every potential competitive advantage not now, but in the future. They have become the first sports franchise to attempt to use Bitcoin as a system, pulling the new payment system into the NBA to see if it can work and be accepted by fans in a digital world. The team has been aggressive in saying they would look abroad to grow their fan base, especially to India, a market that is fertile for hoops but also a key part of the new fan base emerging in central California for all sports. They are business moves that are not just forward-thinking for sports; they are priorities for any global business looking to compete in the US today. The Kings, according to the new culture, will lead in business innovation and take chances, in addition to again being the fan-centric team they were once known for being. It is smart, simple, and certainly buzz worthy.
Now are some of these things different from what other new owners have done? The Jacksonville Jaguars under Shahid Khan made their intentions of growing a fan base in the UK well known and made the bold attempt to be the franchise of choice once a year for several years in London, giving up a home game they probably wouldn’t have sold out anyway. They created a state of the art social monitoring suite for fans, a suite that was probably not being sold but one that showed how valuable the team felt the digital space will be in the future. The Orlando Magic are pushing their community initiatives as the team rebuilds. The Golden State Warriors, now on the upswing but in their darker years when new owners led by Peter Guber and Joe Lacob (Ranadivé had a minority stake their too) cultivated bloggers and other forms of social media to draw attention, and played with all sorts of creative ticket pricing to be innovative and forward-thinking, so many of the “changes” are different perhaps only to Sacramento right now.
One other apparent constant in the recent influx of owners is the desire to try the business initiatives and stay away from the issue of who is on the court. Like the Warriors and the Jags, Ranadivé appears fixated on the fan and the future business experience, and has gone after names both large (Shaquille O’Neal) and small to help raise the profile and “street cred” of the team on the court. The owners are present and involved, but publicly they talk business, not players. All of those moves are part of the changing business culture that goes in the organization.
Will it work for the long term? At the end of the day you need success on the field and in the business side, and while they don’t always go hand in hand, in order to have the culture work you need both pieces working well and consistently. The Kings have revived a franchise that is more part of the fabric of the community than probably ever before, and they have made their first steps with business and fan innovation vs. large player spends. As sports goes global, the work Vivek Ranadivé is doing and the culture he is building is worth a look, its making a big impression in a small market, and if the initiatives work, look for others to join along.
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