The LA Clippers

Acquired opens its thirty-sixth episode by leaving technology behind: the subject is Steve Ballmer's 2014 purchase of the Los Angeles Clippers for $2 billion. Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal state their own distance from the subject up front — neither is a serious NBA fan, and they say so before offering any analysis, which frames the episode as a test of whether the Acquired method transfers to a business whose product is a sports team rather than software.

The reason the deal is in scope is stated plainly: a $2 billion transaction involving Ballmer belongs in the same analytical frame as the Virgin–Alaska airline deal the show had already covered. The hosts treat the episode as an exercise in applying a consistent methodology to an unfamiliar industry rather than as a sports conversation.

The history they lay out is a chain of relocations and ownership swaps. The franchise began as the Buffalo Braves in 1970, one of three expansion teams that joined the NBA that year. Its early problem was scheduling: another basketball team in Buffalo, the Canisius Golden Griffins, held prior claim on the arena's best dates, which suppressed the Braves' ability to build a fan base.

That constraint produced the pattern that would repeat for decades. John Brown Jr., who bought the team after a couple of years, deliberately dismantled the roster — trading away the stars so attendance would collapse and the lease could be broken. David's framing is that this was intentional, not incompetence: the point was to make the team movable.

The move itself came through an ownership swap rather than a sale. In 1978 Brown traded ownership with Irv Levin, who owned the Celtics and wanted to move them to Southern California; the league would not permit that, so Levin took the Braves instead and moved them to San Diego, renaming them the Clippers after the sailboats in the bay. Ben's reaction captures how strange the mechanism was: the Clippers' move to California happened by swapping one franchise for another rather than by buying and relocating.

Donald Sterling bought the team in 1981 for $12.5 million. The hosts note the immediate contradiction between his promise at the introductory press conference — that he would spend "unlimited sums" to build a contender — and his later reputation for spending nothing on players. David also describes Sterling's advertising campaign in San Diego, which put his own face on billboards and buses under the line "My Promise: I will make you proud of the Clippers."

In 1984 Sterling moved the team to Los Angeles against the league's wishes, which by the league's by-laws he could not lawfully do. His route around the rules was litigation: the league fined him heavily, he sued for $100 million, and the league stood down and reduced the fine. Ben's summary is that the franchise's history consists of moves, ownership trades and absurd lawsuits — to which David answers that it sounds like a technology company.

The results were correspondingly bad. The Clippers made the playoffs four times in 25 years, and David cites the striking statistic that the franchise has the worst winning percentage of any team in any major American sport. Ben's observation is that this is harder than mediocrity: statistically, being that bad requires effort.

Two details illustrate the dysfunction. In 2009 ESPN named the Clippers the worst franchise in professional sports, and at some point in the late 2000s Sterling began heckling his own players from his courtside seats — behavior the hosts compare to a fan taunting the opposing team, except directed at the team he owned.