Inside Mat Ishbia’s corner office at Footprint Center there are no mementos memorializing his basketball career. Not yet, anyway. No framed jersey, no autographed ball. It has been 21 years since Ishbia played his last game at Michigan State and longer since he concluded his playing career would end there. He spent a year as a student assistant on Tom Izzo’s staff before moving into the mortgage business, where he helped build United Wholesale Mortgage into a multibillion-dollar company. It was Izzo, says Ishbia, who steered him into business.
“He said, ‘Gosh, imagine if you take all these things you've learned here at basketball and apply it to business, maybe you could be something bigger than a head coach,’” Ishbia recalled in an interview last week. “As he said that to me, I remember thinking to myself, ‘What's bigger than being a head coach? That's pretty cool.’”
After two decades in business Ishbia is back in sports, officially taking over ownership of the NBA’s Suns and WNBA’s Mercury on Feb. 7. In his first week on the job Ishbia executed one of the biggest midseason trades in NBA history, acquiring Kevin Durant for the steep price of Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, four unprotected first-round picks and one pick swap. In an extended interview Ishbia opened up about the Durant deal, his path to ownership and his relationship with his longtime business rival turned NBA teammate Dan Gilbert.
