Baseball legend Alex Rodriguez and business partner Marc Lore are finally on the verge of acquiring the Minnesota Timberwolves from owner Glen Taylor four years after first agreeing to purchase the NBA team and its WNBA sister club for $1.5 billion.
ESPN’s Shams Charania is reporting Taylor does not plan to appeal a 2-1 arbiters’ ruling in favor of Rodriguez and Lore, who have been in a bitter feud with the outgoing owner. Most importantly, the $1.5 billion price tag will remain the same, according to Charania.
Taylor previously accused the pair of missing a payment in their structured purchase of the teams, while Rodriguez and Lore accused him of having seller’s remorse. Forbes currently estimates the Timberwolves’ value to be around $3.1 billion.
DailyMail.com has reached out for confirmation to the Timberwolves and a spokesman for Rodriguez.
Rodriguez and Lore still had $942 million to pay to Taylor as of February, according to a Sportico report at the time.
Baseball legend Alex Rodriguez (right) and business partner Marc Lore (left) are finally on the verge of acquiring the Minnesota Timberwolves from owner Glen Taylor
Majority owner Glen Taylor of the Minnesota Timberwolves looks on in the third quarter against the Denver Nuggets at Target Center on November 1
Rodriguez has called Taylor’s misgivings ‘f***ing childish’ during an interview with Sportico, while Lore has described the sale as a ‘matter of time’ and ‘how much pain Glen wants to put the fans, the players, the town and community through.’
‘It’s his choice,’ Lore continued. ‘It didn’t have to be this way.’
Further exacerbating matters was a report by ESPN that Taylor was concerned about Lore and Rodriguez’s plans to cut payroll dramatically.
The Timberwolves are already $132 million over the NBA’s soft salary cap for the 2024-25 season – more than any other team in the league.
Minnesota fell to the Dallas Mavericks in last year’s Western Conference Finals.
This season the team has taken a step back and is currently in seventh place in the Western Conference. And unless Minnesota can move up over the season’s final six games, the Timberwolves will be forced into the play-in tournament in order to advance to the postseason.
