ha! This is his exact quote in responding to people who say his food sucks: “All my haters love to say, ‘Oh, his food sucks’ or whatever. But we’re consistent. The hot food’s hot, the cold food’s cold, the music’s right, the property’s clean. You don’t have burned-out lights, you don’t have cigarettes by the front door, you don’t have trash in the parking lots. You know what you’re going to get.” Thats not exactly the guy striving for excellence. He is delivering a good enough entertainment draw, skimping on what he can, and making a profit. Fantastic model for everything except f***ing NBA basketball
These are sweet! That black space pinstripes just kicks ass! And that navy with red trim looks dang good too. That NASA inspired logo beats our current logo too.
I never want to miss a chance to diss Fertitta, and that is why I don't think it will improve, but this has been a Rockets problem since 1998 with the pajama jerseys, and then the 2x-too-large-cut TMac/Yao reds and whites.
If the Rockets/NBA/Nike were smart they would hop on the meme bandwagon and develop a secondary logo featuring . A hip version of the "rocket emoji" could be a top seller. Just please no grinning teeth.
You're right. I'd say in general when I'm looking online, so many teams have people randomly creating online branding for fun that is better than the professionals. Some have nailed some timeless jerseys, but the talent is out there. In any case, therockets current scheme is forgettable. The Pajams might be fun for a night, the retro clutch city ones should always be some part of it, but its time to start making this franchise cool again with our rebuild and a huge opportunity for Tillman or patrick if you're reading this to start turning the page and giving us something more to be excited about this organization on how its run(I'm excited about the young talent, I'm talking about the ownership initiatives side)
There are uniforms here and there i see that i like and notice. Most of the time im indifferent. Rarely do i see one that continuously notice and think they look horrible. but yeah the light blues are trash.
They need to rebrand back to the retro look. Maybe dig a little deeper in the 70's for inspiration. Easy way to sell merchandise when your team sucks ass. If it doesnt happen before this team gets good again, it never will I fear. All teams do it in all sports.
No joke, I had a similar thought yesterday. Elon doesn't need the publicity, but the Rockets remain the only NBA team without a jersey sponsor -- not that SpaceX needs the exposure, but maybe another one of his companies, who knows. Where I think it could conceivably make sense is if Elon wants to suck up to the locals in south Texas (he does want to create his own town), so he works with cash-poor Tillman to be the jersey sponsor for the Rockets and/or the title sponsor for a Vipers rebrand in nearby McAllen. The Rockets could benefit from apparel sales everytime Elon Tweets something silly with a rocket emoji. Plus the egos on Fertitta and Musk could meld into a glorious friendship.
I would be all for a move back to the classics. They teased us a couple years back and hardly wore them at all.
Yea that would be the dream. He hasn't even made a profit on TEsla cars yet, they make money off selling electric credit subsidies to other carmakers. But he is and did push the entire market and progress the idea of electric cars. Like the warriors ownership, he was playing the long game, rebranding, and building a foundation and culture to last rather than trying to run this thing like a restaurant skimping on margins and getting profit. We got dollar value dolan and the dude won't even sell a percentage when he is struggling: Wow: Did a deep dive of Tilman's interviews. These are all interviews he volunteered, Several Contradictions, total amount of Bullshit. Ladies and gentleman, the owner of the Houston Rockets in his own words: "The Rockets would never be sold, unless the whole world came to an end and then it wouldn’t matter, okay? If I ever sell the Rockets, it’s because we don’t exist anymore as a country with the rule of law. We’re having anarchy in the street, and at that point there’s no buyers." "I don’t need partners, so I don’t have partners. There’s just no interest in having partners. I think all owners would love not to have partners, but not all teams financially can do that. I have the opportunity that me and my family can own this team 100 percent, and there’s no reason to ever change that." Also: One rumor Fertitta is looking to dispel: that he could be in any risk of losing the Rockets back to former owner Les Alexander, who provided $275 million in seller financing and is still owed some money. Reached by phone, Alexander says he has nothing to do with the club now and would not be interested in taking it back. Fans will be further happy to hear that in an email response to a Forbes question about whether he could lose the team, Fertitta wrote: “That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard.” He says he regularly turns down offers of $1 billion for 50% of the Rockets, which Forbes values at $2.475 billion. A sports banker tells Forbes that billionaire team owners are more worried right now about their primary businesses. "A contract was soon signed, but Fertitta still needed to raise $2.2 billion—no easy feat, even for one of the world’s thousand richest people. Alexander agreed to finance $275 million of the deal. Fertitta then borrowed $250 million against the value of the Rockets, the maximum allowed by the NBA, and kicked in $300 million of his own money, but that still left him $1.375 billion short. Rather than selling equity in the company, which would have meant giving up full ownership, Fertitta decided to make up that difference by issuing corporate bonds and bank debt." "His passion for sole ownership of his businesses is a direct contrast to the ownership groups that typically buys pro sports teams now. Fertitta’s authority and wealth are akin to a Steve Ballmer or Mark Cuban, but he is determined to stand apart from those two both in personality and practice." " In September, the Washington Post ran an article speculating the Rockets might be entering budget mode because of their offseason moves this summer, trading Ryan Anderson and De’Anthony Melton to the Phoenix Suns for Brandon Knight and Marquese Chriss, as well as letting Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute walk in free agency. When asked about it, the DirecTV remote earns a reprieve from Fertitta’s frustration. He puts his phone down on the table in front of him. “Why would anyone think that?” he asks. “Why?”" This notion of “budget mode” offends Fertitta as a restaurateur, as a hotelier, "“I would have a problem asking people to watch a purposefully bad team. In a city like Houston, that’s as competitive as it is for the entertainment dollar, you would be shocked at how your fans can leave you so quick. Then you have to spend years trying to get them back.”" " TM: A lot of people are looking at you and saying, this guy is worth $4 billion, whatever it is now. He’s got mansions and yachts and jets. Why can’t he afford to keep everyone on the payroll? TF: You know the answer to that. It’s kind of insulting, okay? Do you think I wouldn’t go sell that stuff right now if I could? TM: I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. TF: First off, I have $2 billion in equity in the Rockets that I can’t touch, because you can only borrow so much on a basketball team. Do you think there’s a buyer for jets or yachts right now? Absolutely not. Do you think there’s a buyer for a mansion right now? There’s nobody that’s not being affected." TF: If you go find me a buyer for my yachts and my mansions and my jets, I’ll sell them tomorrow. -See also :https://www.businessinsider.com/bil...ring-the-pandemic-coronavirus-vaccines-2021-1 -Luxury Real estate, JEts, all high end things had amazing sales in fact. As usual tillman is Bullshitting to anyone still willing to eat out of his ass. "Fertitta is flying to Los Angeles to spend a few days with his family for his daughter’s 21st birthday. Fertitta’s other G5 is still over an hour behind us — yeah, the other G5 — with his family in tow from Houston." "He’ll drive this particular Bentley up to a particular mileage point where it can still be sold at his dealership as new, then swap it out. Maybe the dealer will mention it as Tilman-certified, which seems appealing to someone in the market for a quarter-million-dollar SUV." " TM: Can you take me through your thinking on how you’re trying to weather this? TF: Well, we’ve reduced all the hours for our hourly employees. We’ve furloughed thousands of managers, all with two weeks’ pay. We’re doing whatever we have to do. The feedback from employees has been unbelievable. A lot of them have seen me weather ’87, 2001, 2008. We’ve always survived. People know we’re in a fight for our lives right now. I haven’t had one negative comment to me. TM: I heard a lot of the managers who are still working are on half pay. Is that right? TF: Absolutely. And thrilled to do it. If not, you have to lay them off or furlough them. "An oft-told story about Fertitta is, early in his career, he would show up at one of his restaurants on a busy night, tip over trash cans behind the building and have employees search for silverware accidentally thrown away, then leave them a heavy tip after they cleaned up." But he hired none of these people. And despite a payroll in the luxury tax he’s publicly defended as a means to a championship end, he hasn’t dumped out the garbage on Morey or Brown or anyone else. He’s not worried about silverware right now. On his plane this particular Sunday in September, the Rockets’ biggest headline of the Fertitta era is the signing of Carmelo Anthony to a one-year, $2.4 million deal." " “The most anyone’s ever been chairman of the board of regents of the University of Houston is six years, because that’s all the bylaws allowed. You know what we did at the last board meeting?” Fertitta asks the crowd. “CHANGED THE ****ING BYLAWS,” Herman screams from the back. Fertitta starts laughing." " Which is why he won’t rule out the NFL, even if he did just spend two billion dollars on an NBA franchise. “There’s all sorts of things you can do. I’m a financial engineer. Every year that goes by it gets easier for me. If a team like the Saints or Titans came up, I would try to do something. “I love the Rockets. I love the NBA. But the NFL is the NFL.” "
PART 2: TM: Is this an existential crisis for your company? TF: For the country! If I survive, the country survives. I can tell you this, I’ll survive this before the country does. Okay? I’ll out-survive the country. Just like I out-survived the banks in 1987, okay? The country will fold before I do. If the country is shut down come October or November, it’ll be anarchy in the streets. Do you not agree with that? -"In his new book, Fertitta tells a story of the economic bust of the 1980s, when collapsing oil prices gutted the Texas economy and sent its banking sector into a tailspin. It was in the midst of this bust that Fertitta started building Landry’s locations around the state. “I had loans at eight to nine different banks totaling about $2 million,” he wrote. “I kept fighting and fighting. I worked out interest-only deals at a few banks and consolidated loans at other. It was a never-ending juggling act.” But Fertitta stayed alive during that earlier bust because “every bank with which I was doing business failed. As a result, I didn’t have to make any debt payments—there was no one to make payments to.” -"but he spent freely, and during the economic crash of the eighties, his companies managed to run up more than $10 million in debt. Twenty-five of his creditors sued him. Thanks to an aggressive team of lawyers led by Steve Scheinthal, who’s now the general counsel of Landry’s, Fertitta was able to restructure his debt without having to declare bankruptcy." "He was $2 million in debt when the commercial real estate market toppled, begetting the savings and loan crisis of the mid-1980s. Though later that credit crunch would seem like small change compared with the Great Recession, every S&L in Texas failed. There was no lending, and no hope. But with the help of an attorney who worked for his cousin's law firm, Fertitta renegotiated his debt on favorable terms. He then used everything from equipment leases to credit cards to get back in the game." TM: What would you like to see in it? TF: I don’t know. I really haven’t counted on the government. I’m not one of the largest companies in America and I’m not one of the smallest. When it’s all over with, you can write an article [saying] that I survived and I didn’t get any help from the government. Also See : " "When we buy somebody, we cut the head off," he says. "We keep the operators who are looking—I hate to use this term—they're looking for a leader. We lead very well. And we immediately spend money on them and make them better. Everybody wants to be led. "Except for me," he adds. "I want to lead." … " "Donald Trump is a smart man and he is not going to just start deporting people. He doesn’t want to deport illegal people. I think he makes that clear when you read and really listen to his speeches and what he says.” … One of his restaurants was raided by immigration officials and employees who were found to be undocumented had to have their employment terminated. But, Fertitta says, those employees either got jobs at local competitors or started collecting food stamps." " The word is that 2020 has been particularly hard on Fertitta’s bottom line. Cash is tight. (Most of the money he used to finance the Rockets purchase came from Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Fidelity, and Putnam.) Financial stability is the primary thing NBA team governors can offer the league. Which begs re-visiting the question at the beginning of this story: “Why did the NBA let a fourth-generation member of a mafia family buy the Rockets?” There are a lot of billionaires who would like to own NBA teams. It is curious that in 2017, well into the tenure of the strategic Adam Silver, Fertitta—with the baggage of his family name, a need for profoundly creative financing, and not even the high bid—made it to the front of the line." ""I'd like to say I'm the smartest guy in the room, but I'm not," he tells Inc., which may or may not be false modesty. You can't go to any of the company's websites without seeing his permanently grizzled mug gazing from the cover of his new book, Shut Up and Listen, which pretty much makes the case that of course he's smarter than you. "But I do more things better than most people," he concedes. " As we walked down one corridor, he stopped to stare at a section of the wall paneling. “Jeff, I think this is wrong. It’s not like it is downstairs.” He pulled a rubber-banded roll of cash and credit cards out of his pocket, slid out a black American Express card, and placed it against the panel. “It looks about a sixteenth of an inch off,” he told Cantwell, who nodded in agreement. Was this being staged for my benefit? Can the human eye actually detect such a minuscule discrepancy? Whether or not it was a put-on, the message was clear: Fertitta cares about the little things. "After the meeting, Fertitta points to his watch. "We cover more in 17 minutes than most companies do in an hour because I will not have long meetings," he says. His attention span is about as long as this sentence. Besides, the numbers tell him everything."
PART 3: "Russell Westbrook, who will serve as an on-court partner for Houston's all-universe guard James Harden. "The basketball people wanted to do it and I approved. Pretty simple," he says. "They know how important it is for me to win."The trade rocked the NBA, but Fertitta says absorbing Westbrook's contract was a smart risk. Because of NBA open-book policies, he knows the player budget of every team and the salary of every player--which makes life easy for a numbers guy like him. "This is what an entrepreneur does," he says. "Every business stands on its own, and you can't get caught up in the noise. " It is the luxury tax, a topic he’s devoured in the past year, subject matter fit for a businessman. Both on and off the record, Fertitta emphasizes how he has no interest in meddling in decisions on the court. “I have very smart people that do that for me,” he says repeatedly." The repeater tax, though, is probably where the idea that the Rockets are going into a “budget mode” originates: Houston’s $143 million payroll this season will cost them in the range of $25 million in luxury tax. In the repeater, that range would be in the 80 millions. “You have the luxury tax and the repeater tax. Do you understand what the luxury tax can do to you if you’re in it three years in a row? It has another multiplier of three and a half. For every million dollars you’re over, it costs you nine in tax. It’s unbelievable. It’s the difference of making money and losing $60 million a year, just like that,” he snaps his fingers." "I know I’m the owner and there’s only one owner. Not three. One. Nothing happens without me. I don’t have to go show up at a meeting. The buck stops with me.”" -Last year (getting under the luxury tax) was a fluke,” Fertitta said. “We were going to be in the (tax). It was an accident. I’m still trying to figure out how we got under. I was positive we were going to be in it by $11 million. But if I’m in the luxury tax, I expect us to win." -" I was in Europe, and so I was six or seven hours ahead of them. So I’m talking at 2, 3, 4 in the morning. And we just decided to do it. They ran different statistics by me. My basketball ops [operations] got maybe a little weak at the end, and I just said, ‘We’re doing this. We are going to make the change. We’re going to go after it and roll the dice. We’re going to find that 5 percent." ""I'm a fighter," said Fertitta, who has owned the franchise for two seasons. "That's my culture, and I think the longer that I own this team, they're going to pick up more of my culture. We had [the Warriors]. We should have stepped on their throat the other night and cut their throat. It's not, 'Let's make a few shots and win.' It's step on their throat and let's take it back to Houston and end it in six. We'll pick up a few Tilman-isms along the way in the next few years."" “I watched Jim Crane disassemble the Houston Astros for four years. Taking all of these prospects and draft picks, and I just couldn’t believe what he did. He didn’t have a face of the team. I just don’t know if I would’ve made that decision. I don’t know if I could. It took a lot of balls to do that, and I congratulate him for what he accomplished. But to field a team that loses 110 games a year for three years even if I knew I was going to win a World Series. I just don’t know that I could put a product out like that.” " So is there any scenario in which, one day, the Houston Rockets would tank for a first overall pick at the expense of the consumer paying to watch 50 or 60 losses? “James’ and Chris’ contracts are up in four years, Clint [Capela]’s is in five years. So in five or six years we’ll have a bunch of cap space to see what we want to do again. I look that far. I just feel like we don’t have to tank. Houston is a positive enough place that people want to play.”"
