SALT LAKE CITY — Ryan and Ashley Smith reportedly paid $1.66 billion for the Utah Jazz when they bought the team from longtime owner Gail Miller and her family in 2020.
And while the team hasn’t done much on the court, its value has soared over the past four years.
Forbes’ NBA team valuations for the 2024-25 season put the Jazz at $3.55 billion, ranking it 23rd among the league’s 30 franchises. That’s up nearly $500 million from the previous year.
On the list that came out in October, the Jazz are valued just less than the Indiana Pacers and slightly more than the Portland Trailblazers at $3.6 billion and $3.5 billion, respectively. Like Utah, both are small market teams.
Smith has remade the Jazz roster since acquiring the team, trading All-Stars Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert, among others. Despite being in a rebuilding mode since 2021, the Delta Center continues to fill up for Jazz home games, registering its 300th consecutive sellout Tuesday night.
What is the most valuable NBA team?
The Golden State Warriors, winners of four NBA championships since 2015, have the highest valuation at $8.8 billion, $5 billion more than the Jazz and $1.3 billion more than the next closest team. The New York Knicks at $7.5 billion and Los Angeles Lakers at $7.1 billion rounded out the Top 3, per Forbes.
Forbes called the 2023-24 season a banner year for the NBA, with record attendance and record sponsorship generating $13 billion in revenue.
“The relentless rise in revenue is sending the value of the league’s 30 franchises skyward, to an average of $4.4 billion, up 15% from last year. No team would sell for less than $3 billion, Forbes now estimates, and three clubs are worth at least $7 billion,” per the news outlet. “Only five other teams in any sport — the $7.55 billion New York Yankees and four NFL franchises, led by the $10.1 billion Dallas Cowboys — currently reach that lofty threshold.”
The Memphis Grizzlies had the lowest NBA valuation at $3 billion.
Forbes noted that several NBA teams are looking at new or significantly renovated arenas, and that tends to lead to a revenue increase, pointing to the Warriors as an “extreme” example. Golden State posted an estimated $440 million in local revenue in 2018-19, their last year at Oracle Arena in Oakland. Last season, the team raked in more than $700 million in local revenue at its new home, the Chase Center in San Francisco.
Smith Entertainment Group, owner of the Jazz and Utah Hockey Club, is spearheading a proposed multibillion-dollar makeover of downtown Salt Lake City, including renovating the Delta Center to accommodate basketball and hockey.
Utah Hockey Club value
The Smiths this year also bought the NHL’s Arizona Coyotes for $1.2 billion and moved the team to Salt Lake City, rebranded as the Utah Hockey Club. Forbes placed the value of the Arizona team at $500 million last year, lowest in the league.
Now nearly two months into its inaugural season, Utah HC isn’t the least valuable team in the league anymore. CNBC’s Official 2024 NHL Valuations ranks Utah 28th at $1.2 billion, just what the Smiths paid in April.
In addition to the Jazz, Smith Entertainment Group also owns the MLS soccer team Real Salt Lake and the Utah Royals of the NWSL.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
