Cheap Tillman spending $70M on new training facility

I know a lot of people here were rooting for Tilman to become as broke as them, things were shaky during the pandemic, but he along with other owners have made substantial amounts of money the last 4 years. Tilman's net worth has more than doubled, the team's value has likely tripled from when he bought it. He used a ton of debt, it was a bit of a gamble, but with the value of the team being 3X what he bought it for he has options for liquidity and plenty of ways to spend money. He has bought the most expensive piece of land ever in Las Vegas, and at 67 years old I believe he does want to win and will spend the money. I don't think he looks at the team as just a way to make money anymore, I think he will treat it as a trophy asset. I think the days of cheap Tilman are over, we will see if we have a smart Tilman or an impatient Tilman in the coming years though.

i don't think these things carry a ton of weight with recruiting or retaining free agents, but Tilman is able to provide a brand new practice facility, a recently upgraded / updated team private plane, he owns a Rolls Royce and Bentley dealer (at one point 75% of the CP3/Harden Rockets had cars from his dealerships).

 

How close is the team’s plane to the facility?

 

That is interesting, I never thought of that, I am not a guy that laughs at other misfortunes or business mishaps.

Would have been interesting if he was forced to sell the team out of despair during Covid.

 

Yeah, the hope was that he'd be so broke he'd be forced to sell the team. But Tilman would sell all his restaurants before he sold the Rockets.

 

He had to take high interest loans to stay afloat during COVID. I'd also take people's "net worths" with a grain of salt. He's seemed to largely stay out of the way the last few years so I'll give him credit for that.

 

I like Tillman as an owner.

DD

 

I’m tempted to say every dog has his day, but instead I’m going to sit back and see how this season plays out. Really looking forward to it. So far, so good.

 

He was levered to the max just like everyone else in hospitality, something like Covid is not something anyone prepares for, and especially in that industry. I think they were using the old cups with Russell Westbrook still on them after he got traded in 2020, and it was around the same time his investment in Waitr the food app was starting to fail. Tillman is an optimistic guy, and even he was saying things were not looking good in 2020 with his restaurants and hotels. There were rumors that he was going to have to sell an asset to meet the debt service, and his most valuable asset that was not levered was a gambling app affiliated with Golden Nugget. I think the PPP loans came through after, and restaurants became "essential" and he weathered the storm, he ended up not having to fire sell his gaming app, and cashed out significantly higher 2 years later on it. https://houston.culturemap.com/news...et-online-gaming-acquisition-tilman-fertitta/

Part of me thought that since Les sold him the team at such a high amount at the time and also owner financed it, I was thinking maybe if he does fail Les can get the team back for a discount as their lead creditor, after all he kept the championship trophies so he seemed to still have interest. He is very fortunate to have Rich Handler as his best friend though, he is actually a fairly risk averse guy himself so I think he balances out the risk taker that Tilman is. He can actually sell 33% of the team if he wanted, and cover his entire initial investment in the Rockets just 7 years ago. Guy is winning, he is one of the most successful owners in the NBA currently.

 

@tinman is the tillmen still a bad guy or naw? need to know what to say to my friends

 

cant wait to see the new facility in practice.

if rockets go on a run, it will be because of this facility and I will have to eat my words.

 

He also recently topped that $270m purchase on the LV Strip by buying Houston’s River Oaks District for $450m.

 

How quickly CF forgets the way Tildo immediately took apart our best-ever regular season team to secure luxury tax savings.

 

FWIW, I always thought the 'Tillman is a bad owner' thing was overhyped and very much a reflection of the modern narrative echo machine where one hot take becomes the pervasive thinking even when it no longer applies....but it made for good comedy on the board at least.

The "real take" version of this story is, the dude is from the area and was super wealthy right when an opportunity to buy one of the most elusive things in the world dropped in his lap - not just any NBA franchise but your hometown one! If I had the bank account Tillman had, I would have done EXACTLY the same thing - pinch ALL the pennies together to try to make it work and when they told me I didn't have enough money and a lawyer of mine said they had an idea to make the balance sheet work, I would given that guy the GM job too...and I suspect most on this board would have done the same. I've eaten ramen for months for the opportunity to buy vintage guitars while my amp is broken. Eventually you catch up and you take care of the things you need to take care of and man did that 59 Fender Jazzmaster really appreciate in price!

In Tillman's case, he pinched all the pennies to buy an NBA franchise on the verge of toppling the Warriors and he was still eating Bubba Gumps trying to play catchup when guys like Trevor Ariza were asking for long term financial commitments. It sucked for all of us because we were SO close but Fertitta was extremely over leveraged at the time...just bad timing. If Les had sold the team at a different time, maybe this is a different conversation...and to many of other comments above - Tillman really seems to have done well with his assets post pandemic. At this point he is FAR wealthier than when he first bought the club so he has no excuses to cheap out moving forward so I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he isn't cheap necessarily but just got put on the spot with this franchise at the wrong time. It's probably worth mentioning he is likely to be one of the last single owner financed franchise owners out there. The valuations on NBA teams are to the point that it's a smaller and smaller pool of buyers who could afford that on their own and Tillman is perhaps evidence of why that is.

 

I like where this conversation is going. Seems to me it's less "Tillman is..." and more about what do we want from our owners and what do we expect from a "good owner".

I didn't like him at first. I felt like the Billion Dollar Buyer was going to make the Rockets his own vanity project. Early he seemed to want to share his opinions on basketball and whatnot. Now that he is rarely in the media (or the media I consume), I like him better. I like it when my owners spend money on the team and otherwise STFU. Jim Crane was my favorite owner until he fired Crick and started acting a little like Jerry Jones of baseball. I was hearing too much from him and the legend Jeff Bagwell. Now he's quiet again and I like him better.

Not sure if I care about much else. I'm here for Tillman if he will spend the money and stay mostly quiet on issues related to everything.

 

I drive by it every day. Main Entrance has a huge screen playing Rockets highlights on repeat.

 

The Rockets were always Swag Champs, they are Champions already in promoting the team.....

 

I'm ThatBoyNick and Tilman is ThatBoyCheap

 

@tinman breh basically said the tillmen is badass, so i'm going with that. too bad the trophies are in florida