In a legal filing in Delaware State Court, Suns minority owners Andy Kohlberg and Scott Seldin allege that majority owner Mat Ishbia is using the team as his “personal piggy bank” and is hiding details about his spending, according to reports from Doug Haller and Mike Vorkunov of The Athletic and Baxter Holmes of ESPN.
It’s the latest development in a legal battle between the various Suns shareholders. Kohlberg and Seldin sued the Suns and Ishbia in August, with Ishbia filing a countersuit against the pair of minority owners in October. This legal filing is a response to Ishbia’s countersuit.
“Ishbia does not own the Suns to make money for the company but he does operate it as a personal fiefdom for his own personal gain and for the benefit of his other businesses, including his mortgage company United Wholesale Mortgage,” the latest filing states. “The reality is that Ishbia is using the Suns as his personal piggy bank, including through a lengthy list of conflicted transactions — only some of which the minority owners are aware of.”
As The Athletic and ESPN relay, the allegations Kohlberg and Seldin make against Ishbia in the filing include:
- Extending a loan to the Suns at an interest rate that was far above the going market rate.
- Selling naming rights to the Suns’ arena to his own mortgage company without disclosing the details.
- Leasing the Phoenix Mercury’s practice facility from himself without disclosing the details.
- Establishing an entity called the “Player 15 Group” that allegedly holds assets which should rightfully belong to the Suns.
- Turning the Suns and Mercury into money-losing teams while profiting through United Wholesale Mortgage.
Kohlberg and Seldin also specifically cite a pair of capital calls that took place in June and July of 2025, contending that Ishbia set up those capital calls in the hopes of diluting their shares in the team, which could have happened if they didn’t pay within a 10-day window. The two minority owners contributed the necessary capital in each case, but they say Ishbia didn’t pay his own shares by the deadline and attempted to hide it by using a debt-to-equity conversion to make up the difference.
According to Kohlberg and Seldin, they should have been given the opportunity to buy the shares Ishbia didn’t fund himself, which would have allowed them to take control of a larger stake in the franchise.
“In other words,” the filing states, “Ishbia blundered into the very trap he set for the minority owners and faced a devastating dilution of his ownership interest if his failure was discovered — a failure that would wipe off his net worth and put his continued status as an NBA team owner and governor in jeopardy.”
Ishbia, who has bought out the rest of the Suns’ minority owners since assuming majority control of the team in 2023, denied the allegations through a spokesperson.
“This isn’t a lawsuit; it’s a shameless shakedown dressed up as legal process,” Ishbia’s spokesperson said in a statement. “From day one, Mat Ishbia was transparent that he was going to do things differently. Contrary to how the team was previously managed, Mat made it very clear he would invest significantly into the Suns and Mercury. He told all the investors that they could step up with him or sell their stake and step aside. Kohlberg and Seldin stayed in and now they’re trying to freeload off the value Mat created.
“Kohlberg and Seldin want to drag the organization backward, and they openly admit in this filing that investing in the team and its fans ‘makes no business sense.’ They are advocating neglect. They are free to sell their shares in the open market and if they don’t, they should be prepared to lose this lawsuit and participate in Mat’s continued investments in the teams and community.”
Ishbia and his representatives have previously argued that his investments in the team have helped bump the value of the Suns from $4 billion to $6 billion since he took over as the majority owner. Ishbia said in the latest episode of The Draymond Green Show that Kohlberg and Seldin “can sell if they want” and should appreciate the fact that the franchise valuation is on the rise.
“I told them, ‘Instead of suing me, why don’t you just write me a letter and say thank you? Your investment is worth more,'” Ishbia said (Twitter video link).
Another sleaze bag so called billionaire.
Ishbia just doesn’t seem like a good guy
He is definitely a terrible human being by any metric.
Wrong, try again
I wholeheartedly agree. No idea who’s in the right in the above story but his family make their money by people not being able to afford their mortgages. Would be a soul crushing business, if you have a soul.
And to think he could have just been a puppy hugger or even a kitten kisser like the rest of us average Joes!
This has got to be good news for Chicago White Sox owners. I would love to see a timeline with his decisions to leave the Minnesota Twins as well. Wonder if any of those impacted the decision in these affairs with the Suns.
Mat isn’t part of the ownership group for the white sox, it’s just his brother…but still, not looking great
Considering the Sox current owner is Jerry Reinsdorf, this kind of behavior is a massive step up
This one got all the ingredients for a solid Perry Mason episode: greed, fraud, self-dealing, alleged embezzlement, fights for company interest, lies, scoundrels and an impostrous villain. Maybe add a few cheating wives, private secretaries in heat, gambling debts, illegitimate children, Mexican divorces, bigamy… et voilà!
Of course we’d need a stiff. Naturally this part should go to Ishbia, since there should be no dearth of instant suspects among the red herrings.
Force a sale and lock him up! Lmao
Everyone hating on Ishba, but he the only one that made attending games more affordable for the fans. The other owners just mad he’s not maximizing prices for profit and making him look like the bad guy because he was robin hooding them. Y’all need to wake up
We’re talking about the same guy that told Michigan State that he would cover the Big salary contract extension to Mel Tucker, knowing that Mel Tucker was already under investigation
So?
Fans can always stop going to the games or at least buying those concessions if the prices are too much for them. Owners charge those prices only because they can. That isn’t inherently evil even if we may not like it (except for charging so much for water, which I have a huge problem with). It’s basic capitalism and consumers are free to make their own decisions. Next you’ll tell me bars are evil for charging $10 for a beer that I could buy for a fraction of the cost from a liquor store.
That said, yes, those were nice gestures and offer a a glimmer of hope that the narcissist who acts like the smartest person in the room can learn his lesson and develop into a good owner. But people are complex and one good deed doesn’t necessarily outweigh all of the rest of the problematic stuff (some of which may have come to light as recent as yesterday).
You’re blaming the fans? What?
No, I wouldn’t say that about a bar, because I can just go to a different bar. There’s a lot of bars near me. But, there’s only one NBA basketball team near me. I have no other choice if I want to go see an NBA game. Thats basic monopolization.
It’s also not just going to the games, it’s watching the games. The suns are the only team, and maybe the blazers where you can watch them for free, without cable.
Right, the solution is not to go to the game or go to the game and don’t buy the concessions. People will not die from not being able to eat for a few hours. I’ve done it plenty of times at a variety of sporting events without issue. You eat before you go and eat after you come back, if you want. If enough folks did that prices would come down out of necessity.
I do get the monopolization aspect but ultimately it’s only the monopolization of a diversion, not of an essential service or something of more regular use re: attending games. I could stop watching sports tomorrow and still have a million other ways I could enjoy my free time. Of course as a sports fan I understand that fandom doesn’t actually work like that, but it doesn’t change the inherent fact that it’s still a luxury of sorts.
Also, why should watching the games be free? Cheaper than currently offered is one thing, but it just sounds like you want owners to lose money on their investment across the board. Again, these are nice gestures but sports teams are a business whether we like it or not and not all owners are equally rich. It probably sounds like I’m stumping for the owners—some of them are cheap and/or terrible, no doubt about that—but I just have a problem with the notion that owners should arbitrarily charge cheap prices just because people are unwilling to modify their behavior wrt sports. For the most part, no other businesses operate this way. Moreover, I imagine a lot of businesses would charge more money than may seem appropriate if market forces allowed them to do so; they just don’t have that luxury.
Reinvesting in the organization, spending adequately, maintaining a good fan experience, taking care of the workers, promoting good values…these are all expectations I have for owners. I just don’t expect them to ignore capitalistic forces for the sake of it with certain exceptions (water, people with specific medical conditions, etc).
Why? Because the fans are the reason these people are wealthy, without them, they wouldn’t be and this is how you repay them?
“I could stop watching sports tomorrow”….no you couldn’t. Like really, think about that? Youre on an hoopsrumors comment section when you could be researching investment opportunities. Why are fans actually fans of teams? Because most people were born into it. It was engrained in them right? You grew up as a child to support your local team because that’s what is there. The team sponsoring school events and plastering billboards all over the home you grew up in right? Are there Celtics billboards in LA? No. You’re manipulated into believing that your home team is the best team right? Look at these comments on these pages or any other site, look at the warriors fans here, they have become complete delusional lunatics because being a warriors fan was pushed onto them as a way of life, not an aesthetic choice. Do you think you have the choice to be a Red Sox fan in the Bronx? Absolutely not.
Running a good organization is how you repay the fans, something which attracted me to the Spurs years ago but only in my 20s as I was more of a baseball fan than basketball fan growing up. That should generally suffice. Moreover, most of the owners aren’t making huge sums of money year in and year out. The big gains happen only upon the team being sold. In the meantime, there’s not a ton of liquidity so the last thing they want to do is run losses. Of course some owners are a lot richer than others, but they all tend to get judged with the same broad brush.
Like I said, I do get why being a sports fan is a unique societal contract which is what makes it a monopoly in spirit, but I also don’t think that makes it the responsibility of owners to say “Let me arbitrarily set low prices so that I incur losses/only break even/make minimal price” because technically we DO have the choice to stop watching or pursue other interests even if may not seem like it. Case in point, I watched few games during the covid season and replaced them with other interests; it was perfectly fine. Frankly, I’m thankful to live in an age where we have such a freedom of choice, a luxury folks a century ago did not have.
The bottom line is no one has a gun to our heads forcing us to pay the high concession prices and all it would take to avoid them is some discipline, planning, and a desire to prioritize saving. IMO the bigger issue is your average American lacking financial discipline and being more or less financially illiterate thanks to our joke of an education system (also, your basic peer pressure/a desire to conform to the setting). Again, though, it’s not the responsibility of owners or anyone else to save us from ourselves just for the sake of it. At some point we have to take responsibility for our actions.
What is a good organization? I personally had more fun watching my home team suck than winning, at least I could afford to go games
“IMO the bigger issue is your average American lacking financial discipline and being more or less financially illiterate thanks to our joke of an education system (also, your basic peer pressure/a desire to conform to the setting).”
There’s a lot to unpack here and I feel like I would agree with you on a lot, but feel this should be sidebarred as the NBA wouldn’t exist if the average American was financially disciplined
Big D – your lack of willingness to pay to watch the league you are this invested in is very telling. It’s probably why you spent all offseason trying to tell people the Kings were going to be a playoff team and any opinion to the contrary was idiotic.
What lack of willingness? If anything it’s the opposite. I’m willing to pay to watch “the league”, just not my local team. Which only further proves myself as the objective observer that I am.
And the Kings will be a playoff team if the team as is stays intact
Dude you’re arguing that fandom of your local team is some sort of brainwash technique used by owners to drain the pockets of the people in their region. You’re suggesting that people don’t have free will because the billionaire overlords have captured the souls of families so that they can instill upon their offspring the shackles that they’ve passed down from generation to generation.
Im a Kings fan. I choose to be a Kings fan everyday. I promise you that Vivek isn’t sending me secret visions in my dreams to convince me to pay for cable. I promise that when I say something bad about the Kings that the police don’t show up at my door and beat me until I’ve seen the error of my ways.
And exactly which owners are rich because of the fans? Ballmer was out there fundraising and door knocking for money to buy the clippers? Ishbia sold candy bars around Phoenix until he could afford to buy the Suns with Suns fan’s money? If you want to argue that the revenue generated every year is because of the fans, thats a completely valid statement. Just look at the covid numbers when they couldn’t sell tickets. But the guys who buy these teams are pretty wealthy before ever talking to a fan.
Btw, any “objective observer” (oh high and mighty lol) could see 6 months ago that the Kings would be right where they are. You’re not helping your case here bud.
“Dude you’re arguing that fandom of your local team is some sort of brainwash technique used by owners to drain the pockets of the people in their region”
Because that’s what it is, and there isnt a literal argument you could make against it.
It’s ironic that he is the one owner who actually did get food prices down, but turns out, nope, all billionaires are awful human beings at their core. Not one good one.
Give me a billion dollars and I’m walking around and quietly (and with security detail) handing visa prepaid cards with $50,000 on them to people living in their cars or people begging for money/food on the street, and then call out every other billionaire in public on some “we have beef, you are a worthless coward unless you do what I did” level in public as much as I can, taking out billboards smearing billionaires with their names/companies, finding where they are and punching them, etc. I don’t want a billion dollars, $50 million is fine for me.
Plug in the chair boys!
You don’t seem to understand what billionaire means. These people don’t have a billion dollars to spend. They have assets that are speculatively worth a billion dollars, and money they spend is assets lost. Don’t listen to the propaganda. Owning stock in a company is not the same thing as being Scrooge mcduck with a giant vault full of money to spend. Wealth is not spendable.
This is correct in theory, but typical of economics theory, it is filled with the lies about the framework of the billionaires, and are purposely overshooting that point and now acting like a person with a net worth of 500 billion does -not- have at least 1 billion in liquid assets – that is incorrect. These mega-billionaires and trillionaires DO have a fraction of their wealth in liquid assets. Your attempting to defend an indefensible capitalism is because you are likely an Econ major and if capitalism falls, so does your entire academic background. Jeff Bezos has a billion dollars he can get today, this is fact that you are all denying.
Economics is a scam pseudoscience, based off nothing natural that occurs in nature. History, Philosophy, Geography – these are all a few real world things that occur naturally and can be studied without corruption. The very baseline of Economics is “Gold = Value = Money = Cash = Paper = Tree”, so the baseline of it all is “Gold = Tree”, which is utter nonsense and does not occur naturally in nature. So the entire wing of academia is fraudulent, which makes sense because Economics experts claim its both an Arts and a Science, but in reality, all it does is serve capitalism, and if capitalism/the billionaire class falls, so does your academic background. Not to mention all of economics is prone to being manipulated and corruption. Never trust an economics expert or student’s take on the current world, we are in late-stage capitalism, its over, and so are your made-up out of thin air academic ideals.
“Don’t listen to the propaganda” what are you even referring to, specifically? Billionaires are proven unintelligent grifters and nothing more. You seem to act like that isn’t true.
Stocks and shares are phony money, we unplug the stock market every Friday night and there’s honestly nothing stopping us from keeping it unplugged forever, all it would do it collapse this mega-rich class’s fake assets, which are fake, I agree. But also they DO have a billion in cash they can get at any time, you are ignoring that fact to defend your phony scam (economics in general).
Fries in the bag Davey. Drive thru line is backing up.
To be fair, I imagine some of the billionaires grew up with the same mindset only to see themselves devolve into something unrecognizable as they accumulated said wealth. Assuming you actually worked for your billion dollars, in all likelihood you would not be nearly the same person as the one commenting here today. For that reason, I think these kinds of statements are more idealistic than predictive with any degree of accuracy.
Ask any person alive today if they would’ve been a Nazi and 99.9% will say will absolute confidence there’s no way they would’ve been, yet history and common sense tell us that a not-insignificant chunk would be wrong. We all like to think we know ourselves perfectly well, but the truth is we’re often a product of our circumstances.
“Assuming you actually worked for your billion dollars”
Zero billionaires worked for it. They manipulated government and markets, that’s not “working”, its manipulating.
Your boy Steph ain’t doing that.