Joe Tsai may want to one day pass the Nets on to his family, like George Steinbrenner did.
But don’t expect him to become the face of the franchise and have the same flamboyance as his late boss, except this time in Brooklyn instead of the Bronx.
Tsai has made it clear three times since the Nets missed the playoffs that he is taking a long-term approach to running the Nets, but he won’t talk about himself, rather than the players or the team.
“I think being the owner of a team in a major American sports league is a rare thing because there are so few of them. The NFL has 32 teams, the NBA has 30. That’s it. So sometimes you take yourself too seriously,” Tsai said recently at his alma mater, Yale University. “So my first principle is, don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t be the face of the franchise. It’s not about you. The fans don’t care about you. They care about the players. The stars.”
“The second most important thing about owning a sports franchise is who you work for. You work for the fans. So you have to go into it with that mindset, especially when you own a major sports team in a big city. It’s an organization. It’s not just you. It’s much bigger than you and I feel like I’m a steward of the team. I want the fans to be proud. That’s my mindset.”
Since Tsai bought a stake in the Nets — first as a minority investor and then taking control from Russian oligarch Mikal Prokhorov in 2019 — the franchise has seen some crazy ups and downs, from the additions of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving to the trade for James Harden and ultimately the dismantling of the Big Three.
Now Nets fans are wondering what the grand plans are for his future.
But his three most recent speeches — a roundtable discussion with the head of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund in Oslo last month, his appearance at JPMorgan’s Global China Summit in Shanghai and the aforementioned event by Tsai Ing-wen at Yale University’s Center for Creative and Innovative Thinking — were all about his role as Alibaba’s founder and chairman.
Still, Tsai, wearing a Sportico vest, reiterated his intention to be a quieter leader, and without offering specifics about the Nets, he suggested general manager Sean Marks would be in charge alone.
“The portrayal of a leader is that they come into a room, suck up all the oxygen, and everyone fears them. And all of a sudden, employees start catering to what their boss likes, instead of what the customer really wants. That’s the world’s worst leader,” Tsai says. “So you should just go out of your way and do very little to no effort. It’s the customer that counts, right? And then when you’re in a crisis, try to solve the problem. Get the company out of the crisis.”
The Nets have been in crisis since the Big Three disbanded, finishing with a 32-50 record and missing the playoffs for the first time since the 2017-18 season.
This offseason, and whether they pursue a star player like Donovan Mitchell, will be huge in showing how Tsai plans to lead this company back from the brink.
