Exits: Impulse control
True Hoop’s Henry Abbott on Mat Ishbia’s oversight in Phoenix, and the eroding cost of corporate optics.
HENRY ABBOTT
MAY 03, 2024
No matter how long a regular NBA season can feel, there’s still a sense of abruptness when a team gets eliminated in the playoffs. There are plenty of reasons why a team fails to reach that ultimate echelon of a Championship. Some (injuries, personnel) are easier to parse than others (existential and identity crises), all have an effect.
Enter ‘Exits’.
This is the 4th year I’ve been writing these part reflections, obituaries and studies of teams as their competitive seasons come to a close. This will be the second I’ve invited other writers to pick a team that stood out to them and try to get to the bottom of something. My hope with ‘Exits’ is alway to give a little more runway to what was and could’ve been.
An admin note, and something I’ve grappled with, but half of this series will be paywalled. This is a model I’ll likely proceed with going forward, but what remains consistent is my gratitude, whether you’re able to support my work financially or do so just by reading. Thank you, and enjoy the series!
— Katie Heindl
Mat and Emily Ishbia bought a post-war ranch in Bloomfield, Michigan. Then they bought the neighboring house, tore both down, and built a 22,000-square-foot modern marvel that magazines featured, with photos of the billionaire mortgage executive, his model wife, and their three children.
Then that house tired the Ishbias, so they tore it down, and started on the next project: combining eight houses into a zoning conundrum boasting a lazy river, a climbing wall, and a few sports courts. Unfortunately, the town nixed their plans for a go-kart track and zip line.
Before it was done, Mat and Emily got divorced, and it made me think about AirPods.
I grew up in Oregon with an English family who, starting in the 1970s, flew Pan Am every summer back when merely boarding would prompt a staffer to lock eyes, light up with an “Oh, you’re here!” expression, and affix tiny plastic wings to your stripy kids shirt.
That romance is notably absent in the stale air of modern coach. People settle into seats these days with senses professionally dampened — damn near every ear noise-canceled, many eyes covered, some heads under blankets — as if eye contact and plastic wings would be the worst.
The last time I flew, after all the overheads were filled and belts buckled, I had a personal crisis. I dropped an AirPod — a newish AirPod Pro, in fact, that had been a birthday present from my wife. Even a child’s foot can reduce that cutting-edge white lozenge to a useless frizzle of wire. So I contorted my body, craning to see around my own ass meeting the seat, then someone else’s stuff under it.
Then, a modern miracle: Rows and aisles behind me lit up with concern, eyes locked on my struggle. Within ten seconds, a complete stranger placed the wayward pod in my outstretched hand.
I thanked her, making a comment about these things — so valuable and yet so determined to leap to train station floors, washing machines, and plane aisles.
“Right?” she said. Then she added that “those things” were a story of “looking for a good time, not a long time.”
A voluble 5-9 white pill of a man, Mat Ishbia performed a miracle. He didn’t just make Tom Izzo’s elite Michigan State teams in the years of Mateen Cleaves, Charlie Bell, Jason Richardson, and Zach Randolph; he made an impression on those players, who all kinda loved him. (Cleaves and Bell work for Ishbia in the mortgage business right now.)
Some point guards are ten inches taller. If you’re that small in elite basketball, there isn’t much wiggle room for other flaws. Seven-footers might not always be able to shoot and pass, but five-footers had better. Not Mat! Over three years, Ishbia played 48 total minutes of real college basketball. He shot 47 percent from the free-throw line. He tallied more turnovers (16) than assists (13) and as many fouls (12) as rebounds.
Soon he was, according to Emily, literally wearing out a patch of fabric on his pants from getting in and out of cars so much in his sales job at his dad’s mortgage company. Mat, she writes in a blog entry on her personal website, “talks big and performs even bigger.”
Though far from taking the Big Ten by storm, Ishbia aspired to make the NBA in whatever capacity. That ambition turned him into a hurricane — massive activity, plenty to regret.
Bloomberg quoted several employees saying that Ishbia’s United Wholesale Mortgage is a “locker room culture” where women and minorities are treated differently.
Polly Mosendz and Caleb Melby report "more than half a dozen sales employees said they encountered drugs on campus. One recalled arriving at 7 a.m. one day in 2019 to find a manager using cocaine in the bathroom. Another recalled seeing two or more employees enter the same stall on a handful of occasions, before he stopped taking notice.”
UWM hired Cleaves while he was awaiting trial in a sexual-assault case resulting from video of a naked Cleaves dragging a naked-but-for-the-bra woman back to their hotel room. Cleaves was acquitted.
Ishbia made the Wall Street Journal for having everyone return to work in-person five days a week in the middle of the pandemic.
Isiah Thomas, one of the NBA’s most famous sexual harassers, was on the UWM board.
The head of a mortgage-industry group named Anthony Casa made up a story about his rival, saying the guy’s wife gave Ishbia a blowjob. A lawsuit followed.
But then it turned out that Casa wasn’t so much the head of an independent industry group, but one of Ishbia’s closest friends. Allegedly, according to this investigation and an ongoing RICO lawsuit, Casa is also a plotter from Ishbia’s back room in a “scheme to defraud” hundreds of thousands of people. There’s a lot more to the story, but the undeniable point seems to be that pretty wild things swirl around Ishbia.
When Pablo Torre’s incredible recent show on Ishbia seized on an outrageous voicemail that Ishbia had left, it’s worth noting he had left it for Casa — around the time Ishbia’s company became the biggest mortgage firm in America:
Hey buddy, hope you’re doing good. Just want to say I love you. We **** took those cocksuckers down. **** them. And we're gonna keep **** sticking to ’em forever. **** those guys. We’re number one. We kicked the **** out of them. Brokers are number one. UWM is number one. You're number one. We’re all number one together. And **** them. I **** hate ’em with all my heart. We’re going to keep kicking their ass every **** day. That’s why I was here at **** at four a.m. again today I don’t give a ****.
(The “they,” by the way, is another Michigan-based mortgage company, Rocket Mortgage, owned by the Cavaliers’ Dan Gilbert.)
A lot of research into Ishbia and UWM comes from the media arm of an investment firm called Hunterbrook, which has shorted UWM — betting that one of the nation’s fastest-growing mortgage companies is in it not for a long time, but for a good time.
Ishbia seems so caffeinated that any honest transcription would end every sentence with an exclamation point. But he claims to drink no caffeine whatsoever, asserting: “I drink water and I love it!”
He can keep the exclamation points going for hours—in press conferences in Phoenix, in local TV interviews in Michigan, in torrents of how I got so dang rich interviews in the business press. Out of Ishbia’s mouth, all topics drift and bend to the main point: how profoundly good Mat Ishbia is at things.
He has built the number-one mortgage company in America. He is never late. He makes things better. He eats lunch with interns and implements their ideas. He has someone tell him when there are five minutes left in the meeting so he can be early for the next one. He has built the number-one mortgage company in America. He does not allow cell phones in meetings. He focuses on action-agenda items. He’s pushy. He has built the number-one mortgage company in America.
A lot of NBA billionaires simply let the basketball staff handle media day at training camp. Not Ishbia. He took the mic solo as the Suns embarked on a journey destined to be proof of Ishbia’s genius.
The media was in no mood to criticize. Many questions began with some kind of Hey Mat, howudoin? in a tone that harkened back to some imagined afternoon when they had abandoned their shoes and wandered together down the beach, losing all track of time.
That same press conference contained one minor disagreement. Was Mat, as one writer suggested, the center of the basketball world? Or was Mat more correct when he countered that the Suns were the center of the basketball world? What a cute debate.
Photo by Kate Frese
Mat slathered everything with “better.” Ishbia purchased the team in February 2023 and immediately traded for Kevin Durant. After beating the Clippers in the playoffs a few months later, the Suns became the only team in last year’s postseason to force the champion Nuggets to a sixth game.
Never mind, Ishbia explained, they’d get better. In the summer’s when the team really got Ishbiaing: On June 6, they hired Frank Vogel, a coach who had won a title in Los Angeles. On June 24, they landed Bradley Beal. Everyone said the salary cap would crush the Suns’ ability to build out the roster. Ishbia assured that they assessed every single free agent on the market: “The reality is, it didn’t affect us!”
The Suns lost Jock Landale and Torrey Craig and signed Bol Bol, Drew Eubanks, and Eric Gordon. Ishbia says they lured those players with the appeal of playing “into April, May, and June.” Of course, the only June basketball is the NBA Finals. So much of Ishbia’s talk implies LET’S GOOOOOOOOOO!!!
But to get Durant and Beal, the Suns executed the most aggressive-ever case of trading the future away for the present. This is not a new strategy; they would follow in the footsteps of Paul Allen, James Dolan, and Mikhail Prokhorov—none of whom came especially close to success.
To assemble his super team, Ishbia discarded five first-round picks, five more first-round pick swaps, and eight second-round picks. They also traded away Mikal Bridges, Cam Johnson, Deandre Ayton, Chris Paul, Toumani Camara, Keita Bates-Diop, Chimezie Metu, Yuta Watanabe, Landry Shamet, Jae Crowder, and Dario Šarić. The practical implication is that the Suns won’t draft a good player until next decade, at the soonest, nor will they have significant roster flexibility to sign free agents.
In September, Ishbia’s Suns elbowed their way into the Bucks’ trade for Damian Lillard,
landing Jusuf Nurkić, Grayson Allen, and Nassir Little. “We,” Ishbia declared, “got better!”
The reality is that, after all that activity merely to contend in the short term, the team was worse in just about every way. Over the last four years, the Suns have descended from winning 14 playoff games and making the Finals, then seven the following year, six last season with Durant, and zero this year.
It’ll probably get worse from here. There’s debate about when NBA players peak. Some say 25; others say 27, or the age of the youngest core Sun, Devin Booker. In other words, it would be normal for everyone to get a little worse. In your 30s, like Beal and Durant, it’s more common to have a career end than improve dramatically. Vogel may be fired.
If you factor in the punitive effects of the elite-level luxury tax, it’s not clear the Suns won a single transaction. Perhaps the players they had before Ishbia, plus a steady stream of draft picks, would have resulted in better outcomes all around. A lot of ex-Suns are excellent: not just Bridges, Johnson, and Ayton, but even Landale and Camara played surprisingly well.
When Ishbia bought the Suns, Bernie Smilovitz of Local 4 in Detroit heard Ishbia talk about how hard he pushed himself and everyone and asked Ishbia if it was possible to push too much. Ishbia responded: “We’re going to find out.”
Sam Amico of Hoops Wire quotes an unnamed Suns source as saying:
It’s like looney tunes around here. It’s felt unstable since (Ishbia) arrived. He’s a good guy and everything, I think, but he’s just very involved. Too involved. I know he played (college basketball at Michigan State), but I’d venture to say he has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to basketball. Yet he’s making a lot of the big decisions. … There aren’t too many examples where a young owner comes in, gets super involved, and then the team has great success. What you usually get is where (the Suns) are now.
Someone who knows Ishbia pointed out to me that, though he’s historically kept in great shape, he looks a little heavy and puffy these days—reportedly from staying out late, sometimes with Suns players.
All of which makes me think about Ishbia’s welcome-to-the-NBA moment. Near the end of the first half in a tight playoff game a year ago, Sun Josh Okogie and an NBA ball tumbled into Ishbia’s courtside seats. Ishbia had dreamed of having the NBA ball in his hands with the game on the line his whole life, and clamped it under his elbow. Nikola Jokić ran over to inbound the ball — it’s legal to take advantage of Okogie’s delay in getting up — and seemed almost desperate to inbound.
“I was trying to get the ball, and he wouldn’t let it go,” Jokic told reporters. “He was trying to influence the game, I think. He should have been kicked out.”
They tussled a bit; the ball squibbed away. When Jokić nudged Ishbia back into his seat, Ishbia threw up his hands like he was drawing a foul back in college — and it really worked. Jokić got a technical foul; the Nuggets won the game by ten.
Photo by Christian Petersen
At the next game, though, Jokic found Ishbia during warmups, playfully tossed him a ball, and then the two shared an awkward hug. Either Jokic was a little sorry, or Ishbia was very powerful.
Everyone got the portrait of a man who wanted it to be about him. “Move your ass out the way, man — owner or not,” said Shaquille O’Neal after the game on TNT. “Joker went to get the ball. Little man got in his space.”
“Some fan is holding onto the ball, like he wants to be part of the game,” Nuggets coach Mike Malone would later say. “Just give the ball up, man.”
Ishbia does literally own that ball. (By the letter of the law, I suppose, Jokić has more right to take it from any other fan.) But the whole enterprise of sports is obsessed with what players like Jokić can do with it in their hands. Just for a second, it was easy to wonder if Ishbia understood that.
Was all this for him?
I’d want answers to that question if I were a Suns fan. Is the point of knowing people like Devin Booker to make Mat Ishbia seem cool? When the Jokić incident happened, Ishbia was sitting with Isiah Thomas, his “idol” and a “great friend” whom Ishbia pays as a member of his mortgage company board, to hang around in his custom-built NBA fantasyland.
Now that the Suns are a disaster, and NBA fans are putting this Booker or that Durant into the trade machine, there are big analytical conversations to have about the market and what’s best for the Suns organization long term.
But at the same time, there also seem to be small personal conversations to have about who’s hanging out with Mat in the off hours. Mat might move on from his wife and his house and his next house. But Isiah Thomas and Mateen Cleaves appear to have permanent inner tubes on Ishbia’s lazy river. I don’t know if Devin Booker hangs out with Ishbia? Or Durant? But if they do, that might be the most exciting fact in Ishbia’s life, and no small part of why he bought the team. Would Mat Ishbia really trade that away?
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