> Multiple various, serious groups are in the process of presenting plans to our bankers. And those plans not only include who the potential owners would be, but their vision for what Las Vegas basketball could look like: where they would play, how they would present the game. > > Adam Silver, speaking to press after the NBA’s board of governors meeting in July 2026
The bankers are PJT Partners, hired in March 2026 to run the league’s exploration of Las Vegas and Seattle. One of the plans on their desk belongs to a woman who inherited half of Bud Walton’s Walmart stock and has been trying to buy a basketball team since 1999.
In late September, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that the NBA had narrowed the Las Vegas field to three finalist groups: Nancy Walton Laurie and her husband Bill Laurie; Steve Apostolopoulos with Marc Lasry; and Bill Foley with Jerry Colangelo. The price for the franchise and a new arena was put at a minimum of $12 billion to $13 billion. For scale, Newsweek noted that the Los Angeles Lakers had sold earlier in the summer of 2026 for $12.5 billion, then an NBA record. The expansion team does not yet exist.
Half of Bud Walton’s Stock
Bud Walton was Sam Walton’s brother and business partner, which is a sentence that has quietly funded a great deal of American sport. When he died in 1995, his two daughters, Nancy and Ann, split his Walmart stock. Ann married Stan Kroenke, and the Kroenke holdings now include the Denver Nuggets, the Los Angeles Rams and the Colorado Avalanche. Nancy’s cousin Rob Walton is an owner of the Denver Broncos.
Nancy and Bill Laurie’s combined net worth was put at $17.8 billion by Forbes in Sportico’s July report that first placed them in the Vegas process; later coverage, citing the same source, had the figure at $17.5 billion and the couple living in Henderson, Nevada, a short drive from the Strip. InsiderSport has valued the wider Walton family fortune at between $513 billion and $520 billion.
So the family already owns three major-league franchises across two households and a fourth through a cousin. What it has never owned, in Nancy’s branch, is an NBA team. Not for want of trying.
Denver, Vancouver, Charlotte
According to RealGM, the Lauries made unsuccessful runs at NBA teams three times: Denver in 1999, Vancouver in 2000, Charlotte in 2001. Three cities, three near misses, in three consecutive years, at a point when franchises cost a rounding error of what they cost now. Jerry Colangelo’s sale of the Phoenix Suns in 2004 set a then-record at $401 million. The Las Vegas number being discussed is roughly thirty times that, before anyone has sold a ticket.
Most people who fail at something three times in three years decide they were never that interested. The Lauries went and bought hockey instead.
A Hockey Team Sold for $150 Million
Nancy and Bill Laurie owned the St. Louis Blues, and sold the club in 2006 to a group led by Dave Checketts for $150 million, per Sportico. Bill Laurie is co-chairman of Paige Sports Entertainment. In the two decades since the Blues sale, the couple have been conspicuously absent from the league-owner circuit that their in-laws dominate, which makes the Vegas bid less a diversification play than a resumed sentence.
There is also the matter of what $150 million buys in 2026. In this particular story, it buys nothing. The Foley group alone is committing between $300 million and $400 million to renovating T-Mobile Arena, according to InsiderSport, including an extra thousand seats to make the building work for basketball.
Bill Laurie’s Losing Final
The husband in this partnership played college basketball for the Memphis Tigers. InsiderSport notes that he competed in the 1973 NCAA national championship game against Bill Walton, the UCLA centre and future Hall of Famer. Memphis lost.
Fifty-three years later he is bidding, with his wife, for a franchise priced above what the Lakers fetched. A man who guarded Bill Walton and a woman who inherited from Bud Walton make an unusually literal couple.
Foley’s Arena, Apostolopoulos’s Brothers
The competition is not decorative. Bill Foley has been majority owner of the Vegas Golden Knights since the franchise’s inception, which means he has already done the thing the NBA is trying to work out whether Las Vegas can support: build a crowd in a city where everyone is a tourist. He has joined forces with the Las Vegas Jacks group, which includes Colangelo, the former NBA player and coach Vinny Del Negro and the former Turner Sports president David Levy. The Review-Journal reported that the two sides began discussing a partnership roughly four months before the September news broke. InsiderSport put the group’s announced financial commitments at up to $8 billion.
Colangelo was enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2004 as a contributor, and owned the Suns for decades. If the league wanted an institutional answer, it has one on the ballot.
The third group is led by Steve Apostolopoulos and his brothers, Jim and Peter, with Marc Lasry as a partner. Apostolopoulos has previously chased the Washington Commanders and the Ottawa Senators. Lasry co-owned the Milwaukee Bucks until 2023, when he sold his stake to Dee and Jimmy Haslam. Between the three finalist groups sit a current NHL owner, a former NHL owner, a former NBA owner and a Hall of Famer, which tells you what the NBA thinks a $13 billion entry fee should come with.
A Deadline in July, a Vote Expected in December
The process has been unusually legible. The Board of Governors voted in March 2026 to explore Las Vegas and Seattle. Monday 14 July was the deadline for ownership groups to detail their sources of financing and their management plans to the league and to PJT Partners, as the Review-Journal reported. Silver, speaking during Summer League in Las Vegas that same week, said the interest he was seeing firsthand in the city gave him confidence.
What that process rewards is not the largest fortune in the room. Every finalist can write the cheque. It rewards the group that can answer Silver’s second question, the one about where they would play and how they would present the game, and on that question Foley has an arena and a hockey audience, Colangelo has four decades of league politics, and the Lauries have a surname that the NBA already does business with through Denver.
There is a version of this where the oldest retail money in America finally gets its basketball team at roughly a hundred times what the Blues went for. There is another where the Lauries go four for four the wrong way, and the story becomes a footnote in somebody else’s ribbon-cutting.
ESPN reported a decision on the Las Vegas bidder was expected in the near future, and Silver has said he wants an answer on expansion by the end of the year. Formal approval is expected in December. No winner has been announced.
