Another similar great story is about the owners of the old ABA franchise the St. Louis Spirit. When the NBA was "merging" with the NBA there were negotiations which ABA franchises would be included. The owners of the St. Louis franchise agreed to a % of NBA TV revenue in perpetuity.
There is a great
30 for 30 show called
Free Spirits which documents their final ABA season and the the NBA merger negotiations.
Below is a summary from wikipedia
The NBA placated
John Y. Brown, owner of the
Kentucky Colonels, by giving him a $3.3 million settlement in exchange for shutting his team down. (Brown later used much of that money to buy the
Buffalo Braves of the NBA.) But the owners of the Spirits, the brothers
Ozzie and Daniel Silnas, struck a prescient deal to acquire future television money from the teams that joined the NBA, a 1/7 share from each franchise (or nearly 2% of the entire NBA's TV money), in perpetuity. With network TV deals becoming more and more lucrative, the deal has made the Silnas wealthy, earning them
$255 million as of 2012 according to
The New York Times..
In 2014, the Silnas reached agreement with the NBA to greatly reduce the perpetual payments and
take a lump sum of $500 million. In the last few years before the lump sum agreement, the Silnas were receiving $14.57 million a year, despite being owners of a team that hadn't played one minute of basketball in more than 35 years. The Silnas will, however, still be receiving a now much smaller portion of the television revenue through a new partnership with the former ABA teams the Nets, Nuggets, Pacers and Spurs.
