In accepting the Botwinick Prize from Columbia Business School, the governor of the Liberty touched on everything from her upbringing, to how the ‘superteam’ came together, to maximizing human performance.
The most revealing quote to come out of New York Liberty training camp has nothing to do with how they plan to defend their title, or how new additions and familiar faces will bolster their bench.
“I think some people forget, while there’s a lot of big other teams, New York really started these talks of ‘Let’s progress us forward. Let’s invest. Let’s make sure that our players have everything that they need.’”
That was one of those new additions, decade-long WNBA’er Natasha Cloud, discussing why she felt so excited to join the Liberty, and she didn’t once mention the team’s 2024 championship.
Fellow newcomer Isabelle Harrison chimed in, mentioning General Manager Jonathan Kolb: “He was like, ‘You guys just worry about basketball and we’ll worry about everything else.’ This is the first place where I’ve truly not only heard that, but seen it. Actions speak way louder than words.”
This is the reputation the New York Liberty have earned, not just internally, but throughout the WNBA landscape. It’s why they are set up for years of success despite an upcoming free-agent-palooza next offseason.
And it is largely a result of Clara Wu Tsai’s vision, which she recently outlined while accepting the Columbia Business School’s Botwinick Prize in Business Ethics and doing an extensive Q&A with the school’s faculty director Modupe Akinola.
In it, Wu Tsai spoke in some detail about how she and husband Joe, then 49% owners of the Nets, decided to buy the Liberty with a helpful nudge from Adam Silver and how while the Libs are a great success, there were doubts.
“When we bought the team, the Liberty was struggling financially, and playing in a 2,000-seat arena in Westchester, far from the Liberty’s fan base. So the first thing we did was relocate the Liberty to play in Barclays Center, allowing the team to play in an arena that was designed for professional sports,” she told Akinola. “We invested in best-in-class facilities, performance and nutrition, everything that they deserved, because they were and are elite professional athletes. And it was a constant, concerted investment in the players’ needs that paved the way for the 2024 WNBA championship win.”
Wu Tsai, listed as Vice Chair of BSE Global, governs the Liberty just as her husband Joe Tsai governs the Brooklyn Nets. She has become the prime mover of perhaps the WNBA’s most important franchise, whether in flying to Istanbul to recruit Breanna Stewart to the Liberty in 2022, or in eating a $500,000 fine by going against a league policy forbidding charter travel and booked their own flights.
That policy is now dead and gone, and the Tsais’ pioneering actions have spoken volumes not just to players like Harrison and Cloud, but apparently, to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.
“He said we brought a non-traditional sports fan to the WNBA, and therefore to sports. So we’ve actually increased the pie of sports fans. But he also likes to talk about how we’ve built a brand.”
Indeed, the Liberty have. As we noted during their run to the title last fall, they are now a New York City institution, and there are few better or more exciting ways to spend a summer night in Brooklyn than by watching the Liberty play…
Women’s. Sports. pic.twitter.com/s5vFbpvdc5
— Gigi Speer (@gigi_speer) September 19, 2023
Given where the team was half-a-decade ago, then owned by James Dolan, that’s damn-near unfathomable.
“The previous owner had put it up for sale in 2017, and by 2018 he couldn’t wait, and they moved the team to Westchester County Center,” said Wu Tsai of the 90-year-old facility, the third building the Liberty had played in over the past decade.
“It was kind of just, you know, just languishing. And of course, yes, by that point, the investment had stopped, as I mentioned. And the team was — well, all the numbers were declining, it was losing money. And so at that point, Adam [Silver] and [NBA Deputy Commissioner] Mark Tatum called us and said, ‘Hey you know, would you have a look at it?’”
(The conspiracy-minded can only hope Silver’s apparent fondness for the Tsais could result in Tatum announcing the #1 overall pick in the NBA Draft Lottery to Brooklyn on May 12, but we at NetsDaily obviously do not endorse such possibilities.)
It wasn’t an easy decision. Dolan estimated that his MSG had lost upwards of $100 million on the franchise. Wu Tsai admitted that there was opposition internally as well.
‘[T]hey were playing to 2,000 people. Barclays seats 18,000 people. That was a hard sell to our CEO, right?,” she said. “He was just like, ‘What are you doing?’ Like you know, ‘We can have concerts here. Like you want to, you know, like block off dates for these WNBA games with 2000 people.’ And so that was just a question of ‘okay, we know we’re going to lose money, just how long,’ okay?”
Charitably, Wu Tsai did not identify the executive nor whether he worked for BSG Global of the Tsai family investment office, Blue Pool Capital. The Tsais went ahead, paying a reported a mere $12 to $15 million, mainly in debt relief, to MSG. The franchise is now worth more than a quarter billion according to some estimates. In fact, Wu Tsai told a different Ivy League business school audience, this one from her alma mater at Harvard, last year that her goal is to get the Liberty a billion dollar valuation within a decade,
Despite the Botwinick Prize being presented to Wu Tsai, the person who earned the most praise on April 8 was not her, nor any New York Liberty player. It was GM instead Jonathan Kolb, who his boss said “masterminded the superteam.”
“Then the third decision was to hire exceptional leaders, and I can’t understate how important that is. We hired Jonathan Kolb, our GM, we hired him in 2019, and in 2020 we had a 2-and-20 record, we won two games only.
“And then from ‘21, we made the playoffs for four straight years … He has a real special ability to identify overseas talent. And if you’ve watched us, you’ve seen Marine Johannès, you’ve seen Leonie Fiebich. Leonie was a killer last year, right? She came off the bench, and that last game when, you know, Sabrina [Ionescu] couldn’t get it going, Stewie couldn’t get it going with her threes, it was Leonie and Nyara [Sabally] who took over and allowed us to win. So his ability to really spot great talent, I have to hand it to Jonathan.”
Though it is not the first time Wu Tsai has spoken about New York’s journey to the top of the WNBA, it was the first time she really ran the gamut on her own journey, in addition to the team’s.
“Who in the world thinks that you’re going to have enough money to buy an NBA team? But I think for me, I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, a college town, home of the Kansas Jayhawks. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, they came on graduate student visas, and my dad got a PhD in econometrics, and my mom got a master’s in math from the University of Wisconsin. And the first job that my dad got was a job at the University of Kansas, and being a risk-averse immigrant, you know, he stayed there for 35 years.”
Toward the end of her conversation, she touched on the the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, whose stated goal is to transform human health through the science of peak performance … for men and women.
Or, in her own words: “We decided that we were not only going to, we were not just going to study healthy people, we were going to study elite athletes, and see if we could discover the biological principles behind performance. And by doing that, we knew that there might, lead to some orthogonal approach to something that might actually cure disease as well, but for sure we were going to learn about injury prevention, and rehabilitation from injury. And really just ways that, not just athletes, but all of us could lead healthier, more optimized lives.”
One part of the alliance that she highlighted at Columbia was the Wu Tsai Female Athlete Program which is run out of Boston Children’s Hospital. Wu Tsai noted the disparity between men and women’s athletes’ injuries … and the lack of studies on the issue. USC star Juju Watkins recent ACL injury highlighted the fact that women athletes suffer torn ACL’s five to eight times more than their male counterparts.
“We have put a lot of money into this, because only 25% of all studies on athletes are done on females,” said Wu Tsai. “But yet we know that, you know, there’s a real difference between men and women, and how they will perform, and muscle load, fatigue, et cetera. There are a lot of things that I think are going to be very specific to women that we don’t know.
“[O]ur goal is to take a more holistic approach to female athletes, so that we’re looking at hormones, as well as nutrition, as well as psychological stressors. So, we’re bringing all that into the studies.”
Wu Tsai’s vision clearly goes far beyond a WNBA championship, and certainly beyond the dream building an NBA champion in the Brooklyn Nets. How her quest to optimize human performance affects these teams, who knows? Hopefully, the Liberty and Nets are each destined to be on the cutting edge for as long as they’re owned by the Tsais, and the stream of female athletes interested in playing for them will carry over to the NBA side.
But for now, Clara Wu Tsai has built a winner at Barclays Center, and it’s no secret how.