“Knicks at $5.8 billion, Warriors at $5.6 billion, and Lakers at $5.5 billion”: Julius Randle and Stephen Curry’s teams are more valuable than LeBron James’

LA Lakers, Golden State Warriors, and New York Knicks are all prime examples of how success, geographical location, and fan following can be the Mantra for success.

Despite the biggest pandemic that saw the world stop for a while, National Basketball Association has been able to run its business without any loss per se. In fact, NBA played the 2020 Playoffs, and even most of the 2020-21 season with empty arenas, but that wouldn’t stop them from making insane profits.

The average value of an NBA franchise has risen 13%, to $2.48 billion, according to Forbes’ last valuations, published in February 2021. Franchise owners successfully negated a way to increase the revenue that they lost because of no audience in stadiums from sponsorship deals.

In the 2020-21 season, NBA owners booked an estimated $1.46 billion in sponsorships last season, with much of the increase in this category coming from jersey patch deals. That’s an NBA record for sponsorship.

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These agreements brought in around $225 million across the league’s 30 teams in 2021-22. Brooklyn Nets landed a jersey patch deal reportedly worth an NBA-record $30 million a year, one reason the value of the Nets rose 21% this year—more than any other team—to $3.2 billion.

Also in September, just before the start of the season, the Lakers, and the Philadelphia 76ers inked patch deals reportedly worth $20 million and more than $10 million per year, respectively. That made the Lakers the 3rd best franchise with the most valuation of around $5.5 billion.

That begs the question of who are the other two franchises with the most valuation.

Golden State Warriors are one of the NBA’s top-3 Most Valuable Teams just behind the New York Knicks

As we all know, last year’s Champions Milwaukee Bucks aren’t that big of a market because of their geographic location. They did make a 17% jump in their value only putting them in the 17th position with a $1.9 Billion valuation.

After the 2020 Champs the team which made the top-3 list is the most successful NBA franchise of the last 8 years, the Golden State Warriors. With a valuation of $5.5 billion, the 6x Finalists in the last 8 years have set the stage to only up from where they are if they win this year’s Championship. We will see in a few days.

And the team that is the most valuable among all the 30 franchises is none other than the New York Knicks. Having a surprisingly good regular season in which they finished inside top-4 in the East must have helped them in their cause of attaining a $5.8 billion valuation, 16% more than their previous year’s.

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Although sponsorships and geographical location have a big impact on the revenue, the continuing success of these three franchises in making money tells how important is their humongous fan following that helps in selling tickets, merchandise, and TV rights which are the 3 out of 4 major sources of income.