New owners of the Charlotte Hornets: Basketball junkies, crazy money and GameStop

After the press conference, when new Charlotte Hornets majority owners Rick Schnall and Gabe Plotkin had a moment to breathe, it was Schnall who made the high stakes of their high-profile investment very clear.

“We can’t screw this up,” Schnall said. “You know, you have the opportunity to take on one of the 30 NBA teams — in a city like this? We’ve gotta get this right.”

Hornets fans would certainly agree.

The team with the longest non-playoff streak in the NBA now has new co-owners who are rich but not famous, as opposed to the rich and very famous Michael Jordan. Jordan sold his controlling interest in the Hornets to Plotkin and Schnall, who now own “a very similar amount” of the team, Schnall said. They also seem to have very similar ideas of how to run it based on their introductory news conference and a later interview with The Charlotte Observer on Thursday.

For what it’s worth, the two men won their press conference Thursday. They sounded smart, engaging and optimistic — but with a dose of pragmatism that was even more apparent in our later interview.

“We know we’re not winning the championship this year, right?” Schnall said in his interview with The Observer. “Let’s be realistic. So what we’re trying to do is build for a championship-contending team over the next several years. Are these the right young pieces to do it? What do we need to add to this team to do it? We will be aggressive in making those decisions.”

The 44-year-old Plotkin and 54-year-old Schnall are like you, me and a lot of hoops fans in one significant way: They are basketball junkies.

They come off like Everymen who have watched an unreal amount of basketball, except that they also have unreal amounts of money (even after Plotkin’s GameStop saga, which is being made into a movie called “Dumb Money;” more on that later).

Meeting Michael Jordan at fantasy camp

Like a lot of basketball junkies, Plotkin and Schnall also think that they could be Red Auerbach if they only got to run their own NBA franchise. The difference: They actually have the cash to be able to run one.

And it sounds like money will be no object, either, if they think a big-ticket item makes sense. LaMelo Ball’s massive contract extension was a good early example. The duo — we need a decent nickname for the two, if anyone has a good suggestion — has plenty of money. What they don’t have and are dreaming of, though, is a championship.

Schnall, who lives in New York, played recreational and “over-40” league basketball five times a week, he said, before he tore his meniscus in 2016. He first met Jordan 20 years ago when he went to one of Jordan’s fantasy basketball camps. Of playing basketball, Schnall said: “It’s my favorite thing to do in the world.”

Plotkin, who lives in Miami and has four young children, just “loves getting up shots,” as he said, and watches the game closely. He’s a fan and has been for decades. He grew up in Maine and still bemoans the fact his parents didn’t buy him one of those classic Hornets teal-and-purple Starter jackets in the early 1990s that he desperately wanted, although he said: “I think I might get one now.”

Here’s Plotkin on Thursday discussing the Hornets’ troubles of the past few years (he’s had a minority stake since 2019) and sounding very much like a guy seated in Section 204 at Spectrum Center.

“We were just speaking with Mark Williams,” Plotkin said, referring to the Charlotte Hornets’ 7-foot center. “When he came into the starting lineup, there was a palpable difference in how this team defended. Being a (minority owner) of this team for the last four or five years — there’s been no rim protection! And so to anchor yourself with a high basketball IQ player on the back end of your defense who can alter shots and shoot the basketball a little bit and rim-run? That’s really important.”

Gabe Plotkin, Seth Rogen and GameStop

Plotkin and Schnall both made gobs of money in the world of finance, and that’s a world I don’t pretend to understand. But I do understand that when actor Seth Rogen is playing you in a movie called “Dumb Money,” and the preview trailer shows Rogen/you bemoaning the fact that you lost a billion dollars today and also a billion dollars yesterday, it’s probably not a good thing and you’re also probably not the hero of that movie.

Plotkin once ran a hedge fund called Melvin Capital. He eventually had to shut it down in 2022, in in part because he lost many millions on being on the wrong side of a GameStop stock bet.

Plotkin’s fund had bet heavily that GameStop’s stock would fall. Instead, GameStop skyrocketed when numerous amateur investors, mostly coordinating through social media, kept buying its shares and pushing up the price. I asked Plotkin Thursday if the GameStop saga had made him “poor for a second.”

“No, look,” Plotkin said. “I think I was fortunate at that point in my career where for 15-20 years — kind of unbelievable success. I launched a fund… We had industry-leading returns in the business. Went from a billion dollars in assets to 13 billion. Most of that was organic.

“And so I was at a pretty young age and was managing a pretty big business, and had had a lot of success. What happened was a really bizarre dynamic in finance history, where a really bad business got taken to incredible heights by a bunch of people online. And it’s unprecedented and it’s unfortunate. But you learn from it. And it didn’t kill me. And I think it’s something you try to grow from. Being here today and kind of looking at the next chapter — I’m really excited about that.”

Will the new owners be around?

Schnall said he was in the process of buying an apartment in Charlotte so he could more easily move between New York and the Queen City and watch the team. Plotkin said he wasn’t buying anything in Charlotte as of yet, but that he also planned to be around Charlotte a good bit for games. This is essential, as Jordan was mostly an absentee owner for the past few years..

Schnall’s experience as a minority owner with the Atlanta Hawks will be valuable, he believes (this team also has numerous minority owners, including recording artist Eric Church, who attended Thursday’s press conference).

The two men will alternate the role as “governor” of the Hornets, which relates mostly to voting on league issues and the like. Schnall will have the job first, but it will then rotate to Plotkin after five years, and they will continue an every-five-year rotation for as long as they own the team.

“I’ve watched all 30 teams,” Schnall said. “I know all 30 owners, We have the chance to do something special. We’re different.”

Let’s hope so.

Jordan did a lot of good things off the court in Charlotte — bringing back the Hornets’ name and history, investing in the community, making the Hornets much more valuable (which also helped him cash out on very favorable terms). But the Hornets simply didn’t win with him at the helm.

By the standard that certainly the ultra-competitive Jordan values most of all — the win-loss record — he was a failure as an owner. In 17 years as the team’s primary basketball decision-maker, starting in 2006 even before he officially bought the team from Bob Johnson, Jordan’s Hornets never won a single playoff series. Not one.

Jordan still has a small stake in the team, but Schnall and Plotkin left no doubt Thursday who’s running things now.

“This is our team,” Plotkin said.

We have a single, simple goal, which is to create the premier franchise in the NBA,” Schnall said.

I wish them luck. You’re tired of watching a losing NBA team, and I’m tired of writing about one.

If Schnall and Plotkin succeed, so will the Hornets. And it’s well past time for that to happen.