CHARLOTTE — Few people have had more of a front-row seat for the history of NBA basketball in Charlotte than Felix Sabates.
The entrepreneur and former car dealership owner invested in the city’s original expansion franchise led by George Shinn in 1987, again with Charlotte’s second expansion team in 2003 after Shinn moved the original Hornets to Louisiana, and stayed on through the Michael Jordan era that started in 2010.
At 78, Sabates is ready to get out of his basketball investment — “I’ll need a wheelchair to get to my seat,” he quipped — but not because of Jordan’s imminent sale of majority interest in the Hornets.
On June 22, the day of the NBA Draft, Sabates ran into Gabe Plotkin, one of two Wall Street financiers heading the group buying most of Jordan’s stake in the Hornets, in the lobby of The Ritz-Carlton, Charlotte hotel next to Spectrum Center. They chatted about basketball and the incoming regime.
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“I’m excited,” Sabates told CBJ, referring to the investor group headed by Plotkin and Atlanta Hawks minority owner Rick Schnall. “These guys want to win. They’re going to put up the money. And they’re young enough to do it. I’ve got shoes older than these guys.”
Plotkin is known in financial circles as a protégé of hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, the owner of Major League Baseball’s New York Mets, and for the dissolution of Melvin Capital, an investment firm named for Plotkin’s grandfather. He shuttered Melvin Capital last year after losing billions of dollars on so-called meme stocks in 2021.
Schnall, a partner at New York private equity firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice, is a lifelong basketball fan and avid recreational player.
CBJ recently spoke with industry experts about the state of the Hornets franchise and some of the decisions and challenges the new owners will face. See what they had to say here.
(WATCH: Hornets, LaMelo Ball agree to rookie max extension, report says)
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