Is Tilman Really Willing to Pay Tax?

When he said 500 on the table, he didn't mean 500 million. He meant 500 bucks. And it would take a couple days to round it up. Might need to sell some bonds to get it

 

Tilman:

Is there an inaccurate perception of you? Or are you too busy to pay attention to that?

You always know. Sometimes people think I'm more involved in things than I am. People will ask me "Are you in the bubble?" In the bubble? What would I be doing in the bubble? I got Daryl & Raf down there, who's my head of VP of basketball ops. Why would I be down there? I'm not making any decisions. I start making decisions, we're really in trouble.

Our best chance to win a championship is playing the kind of ball we're playing. They think our odds are a little bit better this way. They're doing all the analytics. Do I question certain things? Yes, of course I do. But I pay these guys a bunch of money to bring & make the right decision. I have all the faith in the world in the decisions they're making, all the faith in the world the way Mike is coaching the team and long as we're in the playoffs & set ourselves up for a chance, if we have a 10% chance to win the championship this year, that puts us among the top 5 teams. No one thought Toronto would win last year. It takes luck. That's why the great LeBron only has 3. It just takes luck to win a championship. It took luck for Golden State for Chris Paul to get hurt. Could they have still come back & won, as great as they were? Possibly but we were unlucky. Last year they were unlucky to lose Kevin. You want to set yourself up. With the basketball ops people I have and players we have, that's what we're doing. You set yourself up for success.

You sound much more like a fan than a heads-will-roll-if-we-lose owner.

I laugh at this. "Oh, this is Mike D'Antoni's last stand if he doesn't make it to the Finals. He's gone." I read crap like that & I laugh. I'm gonna have a coach that could even get to the 2nd round and take the Lakers to 7 games and I'm gonna go get rid of him? Absolutely not unless James, Russ, Daryl & Raf come in and say "It's time to change coaches." I wouldn't make that decision on something like that if we're clicking & things are going well. I laugh at that kind of stuff. There's a reason I have so many employees here & VPs that have been with me 25-28 years because I don't make stupid decisions. I would never have an ultimatum. "Mike D'Antoni, if you don't make it to the Western Conference Finals you won't be here next year." That's stupidity when people write stuff like that. ... That's the kind of stuff where people write that don't know what they're writing about and just say stupid stuff. That's the only thing that bothers me but people write stupid stuff all the time.

People say they maneuvered to get under the luxury tax this year. We were never in the luxury tax. If Covington would have made $3M-$4M more, we would have been in the luxury tax. We don't make basketball decisions of $2M-$3M dollars based on the luxury tax.

Our whole budget this year was to be in the luxury tax.

The whole key is can you win a championship if you go into the luxury tax? $5M or $10M is never going to stop us from going into the luxury tax if we can get the right player that we feel like takes our odds up to 20% to win a champion. We want to be champions. It's little dollars. You win a championship, it's probably worth $30M-$50M the following year to you from sponsorships and people wanting to buy tickets and everything else. So you want to spend the money to win a championship but you don't go out and say "Ahh I'm going to get in the luxury tax just to get in it." Everyone will see us go into the luxury tax when we can get the right player. Covington, we would have gone into the luxury tax, we just didn't have to get into the luxury tax.

There was a great car collection in Galveston, TX that a dealer had here. I love Galveston to begin with. It was one of the top car collections in the State of Texas. It was only a couple of million dollars. Now a couple million of dollars 15-20 years ago is a lot more than it is today but I still had the ability to do the deal and I negotiated over a few hundred thousand dollars and lost it. That taught me a lesson. If you really want something, don't worry about a few million dollars. That goes for any basketball player I want too. They think enough of us to want to play here, we're sure gonna go get 'em.

 

he talks the talk, doesnt walk the walk.