PONTIAC, Mich. — As the older sibling, part of Justin Ishbia’s job wasn’t just to look out for his younger brother, Mat, growing up in suburban Detroit. It was also to put him in his place, even as he showed him the way.
Yet the way Mat Ishbia persisted as a teenager, that wasn’t easy. Especially when it came to basketball, and those rough-and-tumble games of 1-on-1 at the backyard hoop in Birmingham, where Justin would pretend to be Larry Bird and Mat played the role of Isiah Thomas, or sometimes Magic Johnson.
“We pushed each other, and we fought back and forth,” Justin recalled with a laugh last week in Phoenix, where the two brothers traded elbows on a different stage and assumed new titles, as Mat, now the president and CEO of Pontiac-based United Wholesale Mortgage, was introduced as the majority owner of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns.
A day later, they’d send shockwaves across the league, pulling off a blockbuster trade to acquire one of the game’s biggest stars in Kevin Durant, making the Suns an instant title contender while serving notice about his intentions.
“I'm not sitting here planning to win,” Mat Ishbia said Monday in an interview with The Detroit News, among the first since the trade was finalized. “We’re gonna go try to win right now.”
For Justin, the 45-year-old CEO and founder of Shore Capital Partners in Chicago, the full-circle irony in all this is hard to miss. The younger brother he’d come home from college to find still chasing those hoop dreams — “He said, ‘I'm gonna be in the NBA one day, and I know he really believed it,’ Justin says — had finally made it, after all.
Two decades after he’d graduated from Michigan State, where Mat Ishbia was a 5-foot-10 walk-on guard at the end of the bench for Tom Izzo’s 2000 national championship team, the NBA’s Board of Governors officially approved the Ishbias purchase of a controlling stake of the Suns and WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury last week: At a reported $2.28 billion price tag for their 57% share, the $4 billion valuation on the deal is a new league record.
And as he sat inside a conference room overlooking an indoor basketball court at UWM’s massive complex in Pontiac on Monday, Ishbia, 43, paused briefly to consider the improbable journey.
“I didn’t let anyone else take away my dream,” he said. “I had the dream of becoming an NBA player. And to my parents’ credit, and even my older brother, they didn't tell me I couldn't do it.”
'Believing in myself'
Instead, they let him figure it out on his own. Much like he has done with his father’s mortgage company, starting out as one of 12 employees in 2003 — fresh out of college, Ishbia made $18,000 his first year — and eventually taking over as CEO a decade later. Now it’s a publicly traded industry leader with more than 7,000 employees that bills itself as the nation’s No. 1 mortgage lender.
“A little bit of that is believing in myself, and no one telling me I couldn’t,” Ishbia said.
But the rest, first with UWM and now with the NBA, is a combination of good timing and relentless work, the same trait that endeared him to Izzo all those years ago when he was making the starters look bad with his nonstop effort running the Spartans’ scout team.
Ishbia says it was probably about 2016 or ’17 when he started to think seriously about the possibility of buying a pro sports team, preferably in the NBA, where he thinks his own playing background will be an asset. And although “teams kept going up in value quicker than I expected,” he says, “(at UWM) we grew faster than expected. So we were able to catch up to that opportunity.”
Still, opportunities to buy a pro sports franchise are rare, and often fleeting.
“There's only 30 NBA teams in the world, right? And 20 of them are never going to sell, because that’s just the way it is,” Ishbia said. “They’re owned by families and it’s just generational.”
That was true of the pro teams here in his hometown, where he found no one looking to cash out anytime soon. Not the Ford family, which has owned the Lions for six decades. Not Chris Ilitch, who took control of both the Tigers and Red Wings after his father, Mike, passed away six years ago. And not Tom Gores, who outbid the Ilitches for the Pistons back in 2011, purchasing the team for a relatively paltry sum of $325 million.
That last acquisition speaks to the investment opportunity here, obviously. But also the emotional one.
“It's like, gosh, you see why they're so hard to get: Nobody wants to sell ’em, because they love it,” Ishbia said. “So it kind of excites me a little more about being an NBA owner, or potentially one day an NFL owner, too, that they love it so much.”
While he waited, Ishbia says he did what came naturally: He worked. He solicited advice from NBA owners, spent time with league commissioner Adam Silver, and traveled around the country networking. His company even partnered with the Pistons on a wide-ranging sponsorship deal 18 months ago.
Then when the Denver Broncos were put up for sale last February, Ishbia and his brother entered into the bidding, though he says now they knew it was a long shot behind the investment group led by Rob Walton, one of the Walmart heirs with a net worth estimated at $60 billion.
“But I learned a lot through that bidding process,” Ishbia said.
And that paid off when Robert Sarver finally announced last September that he was putting his controlling interest in the Suns up for sale. The NBA had suspended Sarver for a year and fined him $10 million following a lengthy investigation into allegations of racism and misogyny and fostering a toxic workplace.
“As soon as it became available,” Ishbia said, “that was the target.”
Three months later, he had a deal in place, and the league then moved quickly to approve it this winter.
“You know what was really great was how welcoming they were,” Ishbia said of his fellow NBA owners. “They look at it as a partnership. … And so that's been pretty eye-opening, in a positive way.”
Of course, there’s one notable exception that was spotlighted by the NBA’s board vote approving the Suns’ sale — it was unanimous but for one abstention. That came from the Cleveland Cavaliers, owned by Dan Gilbert, a fellow Detroiter and MSU alumnus who is founder and chairman of Rocket Companies, the parent company of Rocket Mortgage, which UWM just overtook as the nation’s largest lender in 2022.
“You guys saw what kind of a class act that was,” Ishbia said Monday, ratcheting up the rhetoric between the business rivals. “You know his character, it was public. It's public now. So it made me happy to see it because it was not a surprise at all.”
In it to win it
Nor was it surprising for those who know Ishbia well to see him making a big splash immediately after assuming control of the Suns, a franchise that lost in the NBA Finals two years ago and posted the best record in the league last season.
“Obviously, he has been thinking about this before he took over, and he is not afraid to make a move,” said Izzo, who remains a close confidante and mentor to Ishbia — the two spoke on the phone earlier Monday, in fact. “That’s what I said to people out in Phoenix about Mat: He’s not in it to have a toy. There are a lot of guys in it to have a toy, and make some money later on.
“He’s not stupid, but he’s in it to win a championship, I promise you that. That’s his mentality: to be the best. And that’s what he is trying to do.”
Durant, a former MVP and two-time NBA champ with Golden State, had publicly requested a trade from the Brooklyn Nets last summer, and when he did it again privately last week he made it clear Phoenix, where the star-studded lineup already featured Devin Booker, Chris Paul and Deandre Ayton, was his preferred destination. His only one, actually.
Those trade talks didn’t get very far last summer, with the Suns balking at both the compensation — general manager James Jones didn’t want to include forward Mikal Bridges, one of the NBA’s best defensive players — and the financial cost of adding Durant. In nearly 20 years as Suns owner, Sarver had spent a total of less than $15 million in luxury taxes that high-spending NBA teams pay when their payrolls exceed a certain threshold.
Yet in pushing this deal across the finish line last Wednesday night, after hours of meetings and even a phone call between Ishbia and the Nets’ Joseph Tsai — one of those owners Ishbia had gotten to know as he pursued a team — Ishbia agreed to pay some $40 million in luxury tax.
“I mean, Kevin Durant's one of the best players in the world, right?” said Ishbia, who’d flown in for an introductory press conference earlier that day. “And the reality is, I'm not much of a patient person. … So how could I not take advantage of the opportunity?
“I'm not going to back down or wait and think about it. If there's an opportunity to go and be aggressive and be successful, we're going to. A lot of times, other people focus on money and how much this is costing in the luxury tax and these things.”
But as he tells his team leaders and executives daily in Pontiac, “money follows success.” And if you follow his path, from the driveway in Birmingham to this oasis he has found in the desert, you’ll understand why he views a luxury-tax bill simply as another cost of doing business.
“It's very expensive: You’re writing a big check,” he said. “But how much is that smile on the 12-year-old kid’s face worth? How excited can the city of Phoenix be if we win a championship? How does it make Devin Booker's career better — or Chris Paul's — getting Kevin Durant next to them? Like, how do you measure those things? …
“This is the right thing to do. Without question, it’s the right thing to do. And now how the outcome goes, we're gonna find out. I’m gonna be watching just like you. I can’t go out there and play. I’m not any good. But it was the right decision, and it's exactly my style.”
