It was 2017. Tensions in the U.S. were high, and Michael Rubin knew it.
Still, the Fanatics CEO, and minority owner of the NBA’s Sixers and NHL’s Devils, saw what was happening to his friend, rapper Meek Mill, and thought it was worth the fight, and all that’d come with it. Mill had been sentenced to two to four years in prison for violating probation, a penalty that, in the opinion of Rubin and many others, far outweighed the crime.
The problem for Rubin was that going to bat for the star musician wouldn’t just mean enduring backlash personally. It’d also make things difficult on those around him, and especially those with the teams he co-owned. Which is why before starting the effort to free Mill, or really do anything related to the case at all, Rubin had to go to the principal owner of those two teams, Josh Harris, for a talk.
“Just about everyone I know told me that I was crazy—don’t get involved, this is gonna be bad for our business, this is gonna be bad for the Sixers,” Rubin says. “Remember this is 2017, this is not after George Floyd. A lot of people thought it’d be very bad for the Sixers. I went to Josh the day it happened. I said, Josh, look, Meek’s one of my best friends. I can’t let him go to prison for not committing a crime. I recognize that I’m a big visible part of this ownership group, and it’s gonna pull the Sixers into it. I need you to be O.K. with me being aggressive.
“And Josh stood up and said, Michael, I know Meek. I know, he’s a great guy. I know he shouldn’t be in prison, and whatever you need from the Sixers, you go do it, and we’ll get behind it in every way.”
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The folks warning Rubin were right. People railed against the teams on social media: The Sixers are trying to free criminals! They canceled season tickets. They boycotted Fanatics.
Meanwhile, Harris kept his word and kept his feet planted in backing Rubin.
Mill got out of jail after a five-and-a-half-month stay. So when I asked Rubin who his partner is, it didn’t take many words for him to explain it was Harris.
“I think, most importantly, he’s somebody I trust,” Rubin answered. “That’s very important [for an owner], because fans have to trust you. And I trust him. For me to say that, I know you’re gonna use that. I’m putting my reputation on the line for him. I trust him.”
Over the next two days in Minneapolis, NFL owners will discuss the $6.05 billion sale of the Commanders, preparing to drop the curtain on Dan Snyder’s inglorious 23-year run as Washington’s owner, while lifting it on Harris’s stewardship of the once-proud franchise. In a month or two, the transition to Harris and his group will become official. And so over the last week, I’ve called around to try to get to know the private-equity kingpin better.
In the MMQB lead this week, we’re going to introduce you to him.
We’re on the ground in Minneapolis on this May Monday, and we’ve got a lot coming for you in my column Monday. Inside it, you’ll find …
• A look at the sparkling legacy of Jim Brown on the field, and his complicated story off it.
• A guide to the NFL’s accelerator program as 40 coaching candidates converge in Minneapolis.
• What else will be happening over the next couple of days at the owners meetings in Minnesota.
That’s all in the takeaways. But we’re starting with the man who’ll try to do what he’s done for decades with sports teams and businesses—take an underutilized distressed asset and turn it around—with the Commanders.
Patriots president Jonathan Kraft has known Harris since 1988, when the two enrolled as 20-something classmates at Harvard Business School. They graduated together in ’90, and while their friendship is more casual than close, the heir to New England’s football throne has gotten to see a little more of Harris—beyond the generally serious, focused exterior of the world-class businessman—than most are able to.
That’s how the story of Harris’s son, Pierce, came up. As Kraft explained it, Pierce’s bar mitzvah was timed up to land in the early throes of the pandemic, when, more or less, everything was shut down. But Harris was determined not to let that stop his son from getting the whole experience of a sacred rite of passage in the Jewish faith.
“A young person trains for so long to do that, and everyone else was just canceling them,” Kraft says. “Josh created an elaborate Zoom. When I say elaborate, I mean he created an environment virtually that let his son go through it. Most parents would just say screw it. But his son had obviously put a huge amount of work into it, and they created a really great virtual bar mitzvah. You felt like you were there. You felt like you were a part of something very special.
“It was a nice feeling at a time where everything in the world was getting canceled.”
To Kraft, and those there, it said two things about Harris.
The first, obviously, was how important his wife, Marjorie, and their five kids are to him—a theme that comes up with just about everyone you ask about Harris. The second was the relentless, fierceness and thoroughness with which Harris pursues things.
That quality, obviously, has been omnipresent in his business career. In 1990 he cofounded Apollo Global Management, a company that, in time, became one of America’s most prominent asset management firms. “Intellectually, he’s off the charts,” says Kraft. “He knows how to surround himself with great operating people and allow them to do what they do. When you’re in the private equity business, that’s really what you do. You structure a deal, and then you turn it over to great operators who are properly incentivized.”
And his success in business has come through more than just his own ability—it’s also, as Kraft says, in his ability to surround himself with the right people and weaponize them.
Greg Reaves, founder of Mosaic Development Partners, first met Harris well into his time as an NBA and NHL owner. By then, in 2020, Reaves and his partner Leslie Smallwood-Lewis had been running the commercial real estate firm for 12 years and were focusing on development in marginalized communities, or communities that hadn’t received significant investment, with an eye toward revitalizing a predominantly Black neighborhood and creating opportunities for the people in those areas.
Early that year (some three years ago now), a member of Harris’s team reached out to Reaves, and the two ended up working together for six months on a project that didn’t get off the ground. But Harris was impressed with Reaves and his team, so when Mosaic launched another major project in Philadelphia, the Sixers owner called Reaves. At the time, Reaves already had one major investor. Harris asked how he could help.
“They made an investment into a project that was in a food desert, that was in a health desert, that was in a banking desert, that lacked high-quality affordable housing, and we brought a $60 million project that just completed construction five or six months ago, to a community that hadn’t had a grocery store for 60 years,” Reaves says. “As a consequence of that, just working with Josh, he wanted us to come and meet with him. We came to his office and we talked and he said, What are you guys planning to do?”
Reaves told Harris he wanted to do what they’d done in that neighborhood at scale. Harris asked what Reaves was looking for, and Reaves told him he already had two companies that wanted to invest in his directly, but the terms didn’t make sense for Mosaic, because they were basically mergers.
I don’t want you to be anything other than Mosaic, Harris told Reaves. I want you and Leslie to continue to own it, but I will invest in you, and the strategy should be to grow to scale.
Harris provided Reaves with financial support, and human resources, assigning senior-level members of his team to work with Mosaic, people who now serve on Mosaic’s board. That was in the middle of 2021, and it led to significant growth in a lot of ways. “It’s been really quite unusual,” says Reaves. “I can tell you I’m not aware of any other company of our type that’s gotten this type of support in this way.”
But the real key is in how Harris views the investment. It’s not simply a passion project or something to pad his public profile. It’s something he believes in and, because of that, he pushes and prods and demands the very best of Reaves and Mosaic, which goes back to a conversation Harris and Reaves had as their partnership was growing.
“We’re a small company relative to Josh’s sphere,” Reaves says. “So what he said to me, It’s important that you become a quality investment and not a charity. It’s fine to be a charity, but you want to be a quality investment and to be a quality investment, you have to think about how your business works to scale. That was when we started to really shift our thinking on how we build our team, projects we go after, how we prioritize our work, what we should be thinking about on a daily, monthly, quarterly basis, where we should be targeting our investments, what projects we focus on, what projects we leave, what projects we pursue.
“And it was immediately providing clarity for our organization on the direction we needed to take. And in that time, since we had that conversation, it’s paid dividends, and our company has grown significantly because of that sort of reframing.”
Which in a lot of ways explains the ethos he’s brought to the sports teams he runs.
In one very real way, Harris’s approach to running sports franchises has stemmed directly from his experience in private equity.
“There’s a theme here that, if I can be presumptuous. I assume stems back to how well Apollo performed when he was there,” says NHL commissioner Gary Bettman. “He is amazing at identifying great properties that are underperforming. He takes a property that’s fundamentally good, but isn’t firing on all cylinders—look at the 76ers, and how much better they’ve done; look at the Devils and how much better they’ve done—and improves it. So if I’m a fan of the Commanders, I’m pretty excited.”
But there’s a difference, too, and one that makes Harris’s sports philosophy distinct from how he ran Apollo. “He comes to this as a so-called private-equity investor and a very successful one,” says NBA commissioner Adam Silver. “I really feel like he views these team investments differently.”
And Silver has a story to prove it.
As Harris and his partner David Blitzer were working on buying the Sixers from their corporate owners at Comcast in 2011, a fear percolated in NBA circles, and in Philly, that the franchise would be run with a short-term outlook. The fear there was logical, since it’s what private-equity investors do: buying companies, retrofitting them and sometimes gutting them, before turning them for a profit. And the fear was prevalent enough that Harris felt like he should address it with then commissioner David Stern and Silver.
Harris told both of them that he envisioned having the team in his family for the rest of his life, something that Silver believed at the time, because of how genuine Harris appeared to be, and does even more so now, having known the businessman for 12 years.
“This is different than a typical investment, in what he or Apollo may have done. It’s part of his identity,” Silver says. “And it’s hard for me to point to any efficiencies because I don’t think he bought it with an eye so much on the bottom line. It’s more about building something for the community, which, incidentally, he’s taken very seriously. He’s made enormous investments personally, and through his family foundation, into Philadelphia.”
Harris has also helped turn both franchises around.
He bought the Devils at a time when they were coming off the Martin Brodeur era (during which New Jersey made the playoffs in 19 of 20 years and won three Stanley Cups) and were in need of a serious overhaul. The remaking came with an investment in analytics, plus doing more to draw fans to the arena in Newark and, most importantly, in finding the right way to rebuild the roster. “He had to throw a lot of money at the Devils,” says Bettman.
It took time, but New Jersey now boasts one of the league’s most talented young cores, returning to the playoffs this spring for the first time in five years and even advancing a round.
In Philadelphia, more famously, Harris’s long-range philosophy garnered a nickname: The Process. The Sixers sank to the depths of the NBA in the early years of the operation, in an effort to build up the sort of draft capital that then GM Sam Hinkie believed it would take to build a sustained winner. Whether it has worked is subject to great debate. But Philadelphia’s run of six straight playoff appearances is the franchise’s first since Julius Erving was on the roster, and it’s gotten out of the first round in five of those six years.
Eric Hartline/USA TODAY Sports
And those turnarounds aren’t the only things that have gotten other owners’ attention.
“It’s two things, one on the basketball side,” Kraft says. “Most people like Josh would be very impatient. On the basketball side, they went through the down period, patiently. They had the term, trust the process. Josh didn’t make it up. They suffered through the downturn to get to a place where they’ve been consistently strong. So he’ll create a plan, and if it makes intellectual sense to him, he’ll stick with it.
“On the business side, the way they embraced StubHub in the secondary market, in a very visible way before many teams did, was an advent of things to come, where your season-ticket members want to buy and trade on the secondary market. It’s not just people trying to come last minute. They formed a very dynamic and creative sponsorship, really before any other teams had. Today, that’s commonplace throughout sports.”
Just as important is that Harris didn’t try to do any of it on his own. As was the case with Reaves and Mosaic, the tentpole principle on which he (and Blitzer) built out the Sixers and Devils was to find good people and empower them to do their jobs.
“He’s got that focus on, I want to make sure that I help on the most important decisions, and I want to make sure that I have all the right people around,” says Rubin. “He’s not a meddler on things that don’t matter. He’s focused on the big things that move the needle.”
“My sense is I have the same relationship with him that his top executives with the team do, which is, he doesn’t come in and tell me what decision to make or necessarily how to do my job,” Silver adds. “But he’ll ask me tough questions. And he’ll say, Have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? What if this happens? What if that happens? And I think that’s the right way as a board member, or as the ultimate principal in a team, to manage his folks.”
Everything is about finding the right answer and being on the right side of the score when the buzzer sounds.
To describe Harris the sports owner, Kraft brought up Harris’s time as a varsity wrestler in the Ivy League, at the University of Pennsylvania. The Patriots’ president pointed out how, in some sports, people with a certain level of athletic aptitude can get away with not having the most exceptional drive or competitiveness. “When you’re a wrestler,” Kraft continues, “you can’t.” And you especially can’t when you’re juggling that with excelling through the rigors of an Ivy education.
So to say Harris is dogged and determined to win would be an understatement.
“I consider him to be an animal, in the most positive of ways,” Rubin says. “Josh, he’s unrelenting. He’s going to do things in the right way.”
And in this particular case, his intensity most certainly won’t be ratcheted down.
That much was clear when Harris first threw his hat in the ring for the Commanders. He was the leader of a runner-up bid for the Broncos a year ago, so it’s not like he hadn’t considered getting into the NFL beforehand, even with two U.S. pro teams already in his portfolio, and a slice of Crystal Palace of the Premier League there, too.
It was just that, as a native of Chevy Chase, Md., Harris’s connection to Washington’s NFL franchise carried far heavier weight than anything that pushed him to buy the Devils or the Sixers. So he confided in Silver months ago: This isn’t just about acquiring an NFL team, this is my hometown team, and this is very unique to me, a very unique opportunity to give back to my community, and be part of a team I rooted for when I was growing up.
Silver knew then that Harris would fight hard to get the team, and then fight even harder to turn its fortunes around, if he could outlast the other bidders on it.
“This is somebody, to the extent that fans lose sleep when their team isn’t successful, I promise this guy is gonna lose more sleep than they do,” Silver said. “He takes it all seriously. I’ve talked to him the morning after tough losses, and one of the first things he’ll say to me is, I hardly slept last night. He’s tossing and turning all the time. Ownership of that team is as personal to him as it is to any hardcore fan. I want to assure [Commanders fans], this is not a professional investor coming in to create a portfolio of sports assets. And this team is very unique to him, in terms of the intensity of his fandom.”
Harris also looms as an owner who can contribute to the league. Bettman says that whenever his league or the teams “have a complex financial issue, there’s nobody better for me to talk to.” Likewise, Silver says that Harris, who’s very active on that league’s committees, helped construct the NBA’s current revenue-sharing model. And both agree that going to Harris on these sorts of matters happens in large part, and very simply, because the commissioners and their league offices trust him. Which is one word that comes up a lot with Harris.
The same one Rubin used in telling the Meek Mill story.
“What I can say to you is this guy’s heart is 100% always where it should be,” Rubin says. “He’s trustworthy. That’s important. … Fans can trust him.”
Earning that trust in Washington, after what all the fans there have been through over the past quarter century, won’t be automatic. When Snyder bought the team, Washington was among the most respected brands in all of sports. Today, it’s got a long, long way to go to get back there, and the fall fans in D.C. endured, that made the climb ahead so steep, is good enough reason for anyone there to take a wait-and-see approach to a new owner.
With that established, there’s plenty of reason to believe all those fans are getting the right one. Bettman pointed back to how he’s seen his grandchildren, raised in an area where Rangers fans go back generations, root for the Devils—in part because Harris has made them so present in New Jersey, through Learn to Play programs and community involvement, and in part because now, finally, they’re winning again.
It’s the totality of the work that impressed Bettman, and it’s what he, and all these others, can very easily envision carrying right over to the Commanders and the NFL.
“Look at the 76ers, look at the Devils,” Bettman said. “Josh will do whatever is necessary to ensure the Commanders are a competitive team, fan-focused and fan-friendly. He’ll put together a first-class organization and make whatever investments are necessary. … If I were a Commanders fan, I’d be really excited. Josh is gonna do great things with the franchise.”
And that fans in D.C. can actually believe that would be, well, a pretty significant first step for Harris. Because it’s been a very, very long time since they’ve felt that way.
