After decades of disappointment, New York is back in the NBA finals. With an upcoming split from the Rangers in the works, the team’s billionaire owner has a chance to cash in on the orange fever.
As New York celebrates the Knicks’ first trip to the NBA finals since 1999, controlling owner James Dolan has earned a newfound respect among the franchise’s notoriously critical fan base. And soon, the 71-year-old billionaire hopes to command the same respect from another tough crowd: stock market investors.
For years, the value of publicly traded Madison Square Garden Sports—the entity through which Dolan owns both the Knicks and the Rangers, the city’s NHL team—has lagged far behind Forbes’ valuation of the two franchises. MSG Sports has an enterprise value of $9.9 billion while Forbes values the Knicks at $9.75 billion and the Rangers at $4 billion in the latest team valuations.
Among New York sports fans, who have suffered through decades of mediocre play on the court and the ice, this gap has often been referred to as the “Dolan discount,” equating his mismanagement of the teams to a lack of business savvy. But historically, there has often been a loose connection between sports team values and how many games a team wins—let alone how many championships. In the first 20 years of Dolan’s tenure, the Knicks had the worst cumulative winning percentage of any team in the NBA yet led Forbes’ ranking as the most valuable franchise 16 times. Similarly, the Dallas Cowboys haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1996 but remain the NFL’s most valuable team (at $13 billion) while the Kansas City Chiefs, who have won three titles in the past seven years, are the 22nd-most-valuable franchise in the league.
Still, some analysts have estimated the Knicks could generate more than $100 million in additional revenue from ticket sales, concessions and merchandise during this playoff run. In a marketplace where team values are often calculated by multiples of revenue, the bump could pad the bottom line—if Dolan were looking to sell.
While public markets tend to be more conservative, private individuals pay premium prices for a controlling stake and the rare status of being a sports team owner, especially in the nation’s biggest media markets. That’s why, when billionaire Dodgers owner Mark Walter bought a controlling stake in the Los Angeles Lakers in October, the $10 billion price tag was an estimated 18.1 times the previous season’s revenue, a multiple one might expect for a tech startup rather than an 80-year-old NBA team. MSG Sports, despite having two teams with lucrative home markets, storied history and global brand recognition, is trading on the public market at about nine times revenue but might command a multiple approaching the Lakers’ in a private sale.
Go, New York, Go
The Knicks were already the NBA’s most valuable team when James Dolan assumed control in 1999. And despite nearly three decades of mediocrity on the court, the value of the franchise has continued to climb.
Dolan—who inherited a controlling interest of the team from his father, the late billionaire Cablevision founder Charles Dolan—has insisted that he has no interest in selling the teams outright. Although he rarely gives public interviews, Dolan appeared in March 2025 on the Roommates Show podcast, hosted by Knicks players Jalen Brunson and Josh Hart, and reasserted his position.
“My hope is that my kids grow up and take my place, just like I did with my dad,” said Dolan, who took control in 1999, 25 years before his father’s death. “So yeah, I don’t see that happening.”
But selling a smaller piece of the team would be another story. MSG Sports president David Hopkinson teased the possibility on an earnings call in 2023, saying, “We would certainly not rule out the possibility of selling a minority stake in the Knicks or the Rangers.” And for stockholders, who have no voting power in team decisions, investing in MSG Sports is, in some ways, a bet that a stake in one or both of the teams will one day be sold, cashing them out at a premium price point.
That narrative became easier to believe in mid-May, when MSG Sports filed a registration statement with the SEC to split itself in two, separating the Knicks business from the Rangers and their corresponding minor league affiliates.
“Should the split commence, presumably in the fall, that could enable a new level of financial flexibility, which could include attracting a minority investor in one team or the other,” David Joyce, senior analyst at Seaport Research Partners, recently told MarketWatch. “And with the Knicks’ winning ways—and pro team financials based on revenues, which a trip to the finals clearly bolsters—the timing couldn’t have been better for the Knicks’ team performance to be achieving these levels.”
Dolan has used a similar strategy several times before. When he took control of the teams in 1999, they were still owned by Cablevision. In 2010, he spun off the Madison Square Garden Company, which owned the teams and their associated venues and media properties, and he then split the company again ten years later, into MSG Sports for the teams and MSG Entertainment for venues and media. In 2023, he separated out Sphere Entertainment for the venue and technology related to the Sphere, his wildly successful entertainment venue in Las Vegas.
The first split led to an eventual sale of Cablevision in 2016, to New York-based telecom giant Altice at a $17.7 billion valuation. And recently, Dolan offloaded nearly $4 million in stock in MSG Entertainment.
Considering the Knicks’ greatest results on the court have come in a period marked by Dolan’s lack of interference—after he hired former CAA agent Leon Rose as general manager of the Knicks and empowered him to retool the roster and coaching staff as he saw fit—it’s somewhat ironic that he has had to remain very active on the business side in order to achieve similar success.
Now, Dolan’s efforts are seemingly focused on new Sphere locations and programming (including editing his face into The Wizard of Oz). The company is reportedly building a “mini Sphere” near Washington, D.C., and a full-scale version in Abu Dhabi, efforts for which he will need significant capital, considering the original Las Vegas location cost $2.3 billion to build.
Given those ambitions, now would be the ideal time to capitalize on Knicks mania with a stake sale. After all, if superfans are willing to shell out nearly $280,000 for two courtside seats to an NBA finals game at the Garden, imagine what they would be willing to pay to own a piece of the franchise.
