Just how valuable is Stephen Curry?
Don’t ask the NBA’s MVP voters. Ask Forbes.
The finance magazine released its annual rankings of most valuable sports franchises on Friday, and, as we’ve come to expect, you didn’t have to go far to find the Golden State Warriors.
Could you imagine telling a Dubs fan in 2010, when Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought the team for $450 million in 2010 — a sum believed to be a 35 percent overpay at the time — that there would be only five teams in the world more valuable than the Golden State Warriors in 2021?
Even the suggestion even makes me laugh. But that’s where we are, with the team valued at $4.7 billion.
There are a lot of tremendous people who work and have worked for the Warriors over the last decade that have made this incredible monetary glow-up possible. Ownership obviously matters a ton, too.
But in this situation, I do want to take something away from all of them.
There has been no Warriors employee that has come even close to making the impact of Curry.
So just how valuable is the greatest shooter of all time? If you wanted to qualify it, you’d need a 10-figure number.
I’m likely oversimplifying things, but there are three major factors at play when it comes to franchise value: stadium, league TV deals, and merchandising.
No one can tell me that Curry isn’t the driving force behind all three factors for the Warriors.
Curry has made the Warriors’ brand cool, particularly with kids. His jersey is consistently one of the NBA’s top sellers. The Warriors logo and Curry’s No. 30 are everywhere in the Bay, the sixth-largest media market in the country, per Nielsen. The brand was made so powerful during Curry’s rise to prominence and his first MVP award in 2014-15, that the Dubs had to scrap their concept of renaming the team if/when they moved to San Francisco. The idea had been to be the San Francisco Warriors once again, but still in Oakland, the Golden State Warriors were having too much success and gaining too many fans — particularly internationally — to drop the peculiar location moniker.
Suddenly everyone knew that “Golden State” meant the Bay.
Curry’s ascent to MVP and the Warriors’ first title in 40 years brought the organization unprecedented revenue. Even in an old, beat-down arena, the Curry show brought in money hand over fist. (It helped that Oracle Arena had an allure to it as the toughest place to play in the NBA.) In this case, the correlation between Curry’s success and the Warriors’ financial upturn does equal causation. All that money bankrolled the Warriors organization’s build of a new stadium. The team’s unprecedented success also created serious goodwill in the unsavory politics game that is erecting anything taller than a toddler in San Francisco.
Chase Center is the House that Steph Built. That building doesn’t happen without the Baby Faced Assassin. Full stop.
And now the Warriors organization owns a state-of-the-art arena in the City outright. Forbes reported Friday that when there were full houses, the team brought in a staggering $7 million per game. That’s more than a quarter of a billion dollars per season for Warriors home games, not including playoff dates (which bring in way more money per contest) or any of the other events Chase Center would host.
The spectacular stadium might have cost billions to build, but it’s apt that a bank put its name on it: The building is an ATM for the Warriors.
And again, they can thank Curry for that.
The only NBA team worth more than the Warriors on the Forbes list was the Knicks, who have stunk for decades but own Madison Square Garden, which I hear is a pretty good piece of real estate in midtown Manhattan.
But the Knicks, Warriors, and every other NBA team can thank Curry for their increased valuations.
In 2011, the Knicks were the most valuable franchise in the NBA, per Forbes, but they were worth less than the Buffalo Bills, St. Louis Rams, Jacksonville Jaguars, McClaren Formula 1 team, and the Raiders, who had games blacked out on TV because so few people wanted to go to the Coliseum.
A decade later, the NBA has become one of the world’s marquee leagues in the last decade and they have the TV rights deals to prove it.
In the two years preceding the NBA’s first massive TV rights deal — the one that boosted the salary cap by roughly $20 million per team in the summer of 2016 — the Warriors set ratings records. There were think pieces in East-Coast publications about how to best stay up to watch Curry and the Warriors, while the Dubs’ showdown with LeBron James in the 2015 NBA Finals brought in the largest TV audience the league had seen since Michael Jordan’s last title with the Bulls.
The NBA’s national TV deals now pay it twice as much as Major League Baseball for a season that’s half as long.
Sorry, LeBron, that’s Curry’s doing.
The Warriors and Curry still carry the league’s rankings today. The guard’s exuberance and joy on the court remain infectious — even though he’s been in the league for more than a decade, now, we still can’t quite get our heads around how he’s doing this and we have to watch to see what will happen next.
Our luck in the Bay to find this once-in-a-generation type of talent is the whole league’s benefit. There were nine NBA teams in Forbes’ Top-50 list.
Curry is eligible to sign a contract extension this summer — one that will make him the NBA’s highest-paid player for a second time. The deal would be four years at an estimated $215 million.
If Curry waits until after 2022 to re-sign with the Warriors, he could sign a five-year deal worth $278 million.
These are crazy numbers for a professional athlete, even one who has three titles and is gunning for a third MVP trophy.
But it doesn’t take too much effort to find that such contracts are a pittance compared to Curry’s real value.
