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McCourt was entitled to collect the most money possible in order to pay off his debts. The judge emphasized that creditors took precedence over the league’s preferences for a new owner. And in a testament to how badly Major League Baseball wanted McCourt gone, it didn’t fight his unusual, unilateral power to choose his successor. The league’s acquiescence on this point was significant because it offered a way in for colorful outsiders like Mark Cuban, the outspoken tech billionaire owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. (Cuban had tried to buythe Cubs a few years earlier but felt he had been blackballed because Selig didn’t want him to own a team.) The Dodgers’ sale offered an unprecedented opportunity for a Gatsbyesque character without connections to the commissioner’s office to buy his way in.
    Bids for the Dodgers poured in from across the globe. One investor who announced his interest in buying the team was Laker icon Magic Johnson, the man who, following in the footsteps of Dodger great Sandy Koufax, had made the number 32 synonymous with sporting glory in Los Angeles. After his playing days ended prematurely when he announced he had contracted the HIV virus, Johnson had proven himself to be somewhat of a business savant, coming to own stakes in, among other things, movie theaters, Starbucks coffee shops, and his beloved Lakers.
    Johnson was rich by the average American’s standards, but he had nowhere near the cash needed to buy the Dodgers. What people didn’t yet know, however, was that Johnson had formed an alliance with Stan Kasten, the man who had served as president of Ted Turner’s Atlanta Braves during their nineties dynasty. Kasten and Johnson had become acquainted when Kasten ran the city’s NBA franchise, the Hawks, for Turner during that same time period. With fifteen-man rosters and a limited minor league, the NBA, Kasten explains, is a small world where everyone knows everyone else. Kasten and Johnson had almost joined forces back in the mid-nineties when the former flew to Los Angeles to try to convince the latter to coach the Atlanta Hawks.“But he turned me down, that son of a bitch,” Kasten said with a laugh. “The truth is he didn’t want to coach.” Though the two remained friends, they could not have imagined the impact their relationship would have in shattering the economics of sports franchises some twenty years later.
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    Magic Johnson’s smile had mesmerized Los Angeles from the moment the Lakers drafted him out of Michigan State in 1979. Thirty-two years later, that smile started a war. Despite the fact that he knew very little about baseball, six different prospective ownership groups courtedJohnson, each desperate to add his credibility with Los Angeles sports fans to its roster of moneymen.“It was like Earvin was going through the college recruitment process all over again,” said his former agent and closest confidant, Lon Rosen, who would later become the Dodgers’ chief marketing officer. “Groups were coming to him and making presentations.” After his tenure in Atlanta ended, Kasten had moved to Washington, D.C., to take a job as the president of the Nationals the year after they relocated from Montreal. He stayed in that position for four years, and in 2010 he stepped down and planned to open his own consulting practice. Then Guggenheim contacted him. Would he be interested in joining their group to buy the Houston Astros? they asked. Kasten had heard the name Guggenheim before, but he had no idea who this group out of Chicago was. And when he went to search for information about the company’s president, Mark Walter, on the Internet, he couldn’t find anything. Walter seemed to be a ghost. Kasten was dubious. Sports franchise sales attracted so many hucksters and grifters pretending to be rich that the mystery surrounding Walter and Guggenheim did not help their cause. “There’s a lot of bullshit in putting deals together for hundreds