Sue Bird played 19 seasons for the Seattle Storm, then bought a piece of the team, and CNBC now values it at $450 million. Pharrell's auction house sold Michael Jordan's Game 3 jersey for $12.26 million and his Ferrari for $2.7 million, 24 hours apart. Lil Yachty made 1,000 pairs of his new Nike Air Force 1 Mid for ComplexCon, and two more in pink that only he gets. Welcome back to The Closeout. Let's get into it.

In February 2021, Renee Montgomery stopped playing and bought a piece of the Atlanta Dream. She was the first former player to co-own a WNBA franchise. She joined a group led by Larry Gottesdiener that bought the team from Kelly Loeffler, a sitting U.S. senator whose public fight with her own players had put the franchise on the market.

This week the WNBA closed its regular season with 3.79 million fans across 330 games, up 20.5% in a year. Golden State averaged 18,064 a night and sold out its entire home slate for the second straight season. Toronto drew 20,996 for one game in July, a league record, in a building in Montréal. Portland's home debut pulled 19,335, the largest inaugural game in league history. Atlanta went from 4,480 a night to 7,000 after adding Angel Reese and moving its marquee games downtown. On Monday the Dream announced every home game moves to State Farm Arena starting in 2027.

CNBC now values the Golden State Valkyries at $1 billion, the first WNBA team to get there. New York sits at $600 million, Indiana at $560 million, Las Vegas at $500 million, Seattle at $450 million. Michael Ozanian, who built the numbers, expects every well-run team in the league to reach $1 billion inside five years.

The athletes got there first.

Montgomery bought in 2021. Dwyane Wade joined the Chicago Sky ownership group in 2023. Sue Bird took a stake in Seattle in April 2024. Serena Williams invested in the Toronto Tempo in March 2025. Bobby Wagner bought into Seattle in July 2025, the first active NFL player to hold equity in a WNBA franchise. Kyle Lowry and Ayahna Cornish-Lowry bought into the Tempo this July.

Six positions over five years, every one of them taken before the billion-dollar headline existed.

Seattle shows what that timing is worth. The Storm sold minority shares in June 2025 at a $325 million valuation. Wagner bought in the following month, while he was still starting at linebacker. CNBC's estimate for that franchise is now $450 million. 

That's the operator move. Montgomery, Bird, Serena, Wade, Wagner and Lowry were all close enough to the product to price it before the market did, and they put their own money behind that read.

The Closeout covered the Serena and Lowry stakes in Issue #8, when the Tempo was an expansion team with a $50 million fee and no roster. Larry Tanenbaum's group, Masai Ujiri, Lilly Singh. Toronto hadn't played a game yet. In July it set the league attendance record.

Then there's what the ownership does to the optics.

Sue Bird played 19 seasons in Seattle and then bought equity in the franchise. Renee Montgomery walked off the floor and onto the ownership group of the team she'd just played for. Both of them had spent a career inside the asset they were pricing. Bobby Wagner plays a different sport and put his money in anyway.

All of them paid to be associated with this league because they knew its potential.

The Valkyries, the billion-dollar team, have no athlete owners. Joe Lacob and Peter Guber built that number on Warriors infrastructure, shared sponsorship inventory, and 12,000 projected season tickets on $73 million of 2025 revenue.

Every stake left in this league sells at institutional prices. The six who moved early already own theirs.

On September 30, the white Bulls jersey Michael Jordan wore in Game 3 of the 1998 Finals sold for $12.26 million. That is the most anyone has paid for an NBA jersey, and it beat the previous record of roughly $10.1 million, set in 2022 by Jordan's red jersey from Game 1 of the same series. The next day, the 1997 Ferrari 550 Maranello he bought new, with a seat built out for his 6-foot-6 frame and MJ 5 on the plates, sold for $2.7 million against an estimate of $700,000 to $1.3 million.

Both of them moved through Joopiter. Pharrell Williams started it in 2022.

Joopiter opened as a digital-first auction house with one consignor, him. The first sale, "Son of a Pharaoh," put 52 lots of his own jewelry up and routed the proceeds to Black Ambition, the nonprofit he runs for Black and Latinx founders. Since then it has handled G-Dragon's archive in Seoul, a triceratops skeleton carrying a $4.5 to $5.5 million estimate, and a fixed-price Marketplace that opened in May 2025.

Four years in, it set the NBA jersey record and a 550 Maranello record inside 48 hours, on just under $15 million of one athlete's material.

The rest of his seats are better known. Creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear since 2023. Humanrace skincare since 2021. Billionaire Boys Club and Icecream since 2003, co-founded with Nigo. Co-investor in the Hôtel Saint-James & Albany in Paris since October 2024.

Joopiter is the one that scales. It takes a percentage of other people's history and carries no inventory of its own.

Lil Yachty, the Atlanta rapper who broke out on SoundCloud in 2016 and now runs the Concrete Boys collective, showed his first Air Force 1 Mid at ComplexCon over the weekend, out of a booth built to look like a pawn shop. Croc-embossed panels, black piping tracing the overlays, the Concrete Boys logo stitched at the heel, "Just Us" on the tongue label.

A thousand pairs in yellow and black went to ComplexCon attendees and nowhere else. Two pairs exist in pink and black, both of them his. Wider release is unannounced.

He has done Air Force 1 Lows with Nike before. The Mid is new, and Concrete Boys is the name on the shoe.

Golden State leads 1-0 after holding the defending champions to 60 points, their lowest of the season. Gabby Williams put up 25 and 11, and she is off to Unrivaled this winter. Tune in.

If you missed last week, I sat down with an entertainment and sports lawyer who advises 18-year-olds signing seven-figure deals. On whether any of it is regulated: "I really wish I could say there was any regulation that will hold up in court. I'm not sure there really is." Full conversation is on YouTube. See you next Wednesday.