From the Lakers to the Celtics: NBA's priciest teams in 2026

NBA franchise prices have climbed faster over the past decade than almost any other class of sports asset, and the ceiling keeps moving. An 11-year national media rights package with Disney $DIS's ESPN and ABC, NBC and Amazon $AMZN Prime Video, reported at roughly $76 billion, took effect with the 2025-26 season. The previous national deal, which ran through the 2024-25 season, was worth about $24 billion across nine years. That money reaches all 30 clubs as guaranteed national revenue, which lifts the floor under every team before a ticket is sold.

Sale prices tell the story more bluntly. A group led by private equity investor Bill Chisholm agreed in 2025 to buy the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion, the largest sum ever committed for a North American sports franchise at that point. Later the same year, the Buss family agreed to pass majority control of the Los Angeles Lakers to investors fronted by Mark Walter, in a deal valuing the club at $10 billion — the highest figure ever placed on a U.S. professional sports team. Mat Ishbia's purchase of the Phoenix Suns in 2023 valued that franchise at $4 billion. The Adelson family took majority control of the Dallas Mavericks later that year at roughly $3.5 billion.

What follows are 10 of the most valuable NBA teams going into 2026, judged by confirmed sale prices, ownership structures and the market and arena economics behind them. Some of these clubs have raised a banner within the past two years. Others have not reached a conference final in more than a decade. Winning helps, but it is rarely the deciding variable. Market size, control of the building, local broadcast income and the depth of an owner's balance sheet carry more weight. Each entry explains what drives that team's valuation now, and which factors are most likely to move it next.

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The Golden State Warriors rank at or near the top of every major NBA valuation list, and the reason is structural rather than seasonal. Joe Lacob and Peter Guber's ownership group controls Chase Center, a San Francisco arena built without public subsidy. That same group bought the team in 2010 for $450 million.

The price now reads as one of the cheapest entries into modern American sports ownership. The Warriors won titles in 2015, 2017, 2018 and 2022 behind Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. The run coincided with a relocation that permanently changed the franchise's economics. The team left Oracle $ORCL Arena in Oakland and opened Chase Center in the Mission Bay district in 2019.

Owning the building rather than renting it is the central line in the Warriors' financial picture. A tenant team collects its basketball dates and little else. An owner-operator keeps revenue from concerts, conferences, naming rights and premium seating across the full calendar, and the Warriors do exactly that at Chase Center. Thrive City, the retail, restaurant and plaza development wrapped around the arena, extends the same logic to the land next door.

Mission Bay also placed the franchise inside one of the densest concentrations of corporate wealth in the country. Biotech campuses sit nearby, and Bay Area technology money funds the sponsorship budgets the team sells against. Lacob worked as a venture capitalist before buying the team, and the front office has been run with that financial orientation.

None of this depends on the roster. Curry turned 37 in 2025, Thompson signed with the Dallas Mavericks in 2024, and the championship core has thinned. The media market, the arena ownership, the surrounding real estate and the global following built during the dynasty years stay in place regardless of where the team finishes in a given year. That mix explains why the Warriors are routinely grouped with the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers at the summit of league valuations. A losing season moves their number far less than it would almost anywhere else.

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The New York Knicks rank among the NBA's most valuable franchises because of the largest media market in the U.S. and the commercial reach of Madison Square $SQ Garden. Recent trophies have nothing to do with it. The team has not won a championship since 1973.

Ownership runs through Madison Square Garden Sports Corp., a publicly traded company the Dolan family controls, which also holds the NHL's New York Rangers. That listing makes the Knicks unusual in the league. Public investors price the business every trading day, instead of waiting for a sale to establish a figure. The Dolans have controlled the Garden and its teams since the late 1990s, a stretch of stability in a league where majority stakes keep changing hands.

The arena belongs to MSG Entertainment, a separate Dolan-controlled company spun off from the sports business. The Knicks, then, do not collect concert and event revenue the way clubs that own their buildings do. What the team gets instead is a Manhattan address above Penn Station, premium seating and suite pricing few venues can match, and a corporate base willing to pay it. A renovation completed in 2013 rebuilt the seating bowl and added the bridge-level suites that sit at the top of that pricing structure.

Local broadcast rights add another layer. Knicks games air on MSG Network, a regional sports channel also held within the Dolan family's companies, which means the same ownership controls both the games and the channel carrying them. Elsewhere, that model has broken down — Diamond Sports Group, which carried games for a group of NBA teams under the Bally Sports banner, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2023.

Results on the floor have started catching up. New York reached the second round in 2023 and 2024, then the Eastern Conference finals in 2025, its first trip that far since 2000. Jalen Brunson, signed in 2022, has been the central figure in that run. One question remains unsettled: the New York City Council granted the Garden only a five-year operating permit in 2023, leaving the arena's long-term future at the site open.

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The Los Angeles Lakers carry the richest valuation ever attached to a U.S. professional sports franchise: $10 billion, the figure behind the Buss family's 2025 agreement to sell majority control to an investor group led by Mark Walter. No North American team had been priced near that before.

Jerry Buss bought the Lakers in 1979 for $67.5 million, a deal that also handed him the Forum and the NHL's Los Angeles Kings. His family ran the club for more than four decades, through the Showtime era, the Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant three-peat and the 2020 title won in the Orlando bubble, the franchise's 17th. Only the Celtics have won more.

Walter's group already controls the Los Angeles Dodgers, a club that spends at the top of its sport, and holds a stake in Chelsea FC. Jeanie Buss was set to stay on as governor after the sale, which keeps basketball leadership in place while the capital behind the team changes entirely.

The Lakers do not own their building. They are tenants at Crypto.com Arena downtown, which AEG owns and which also houses the Kings, the Sparks and, until Intuit $INTU Dome opened in 2024, the Clippers. Reaching a $10 billion price without that asset sets the Lakers apart from franchises whose valuations lean heavily on the venues their owners control.

Local broadcasting makes up much of the difference. The team signed a 20-year regional television deal with Time Warner Cable in 2011, now operating as Spectrum SportsNet, among the richest local rights arrangements in the league. Los Angeles is the second-largest media market in the country, and the Lakers' audience runs well beyond it.

The roster keeps that national draw intact. LeBron James signed in 2018 and delivered the 2020 championship. Luka Doncic arrived in the February 2025 trade with Dallas, giving the franchise a centerpiece for the decade ahead.

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A group led by Bill Chisholm agreed in 2025 to buy the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion, the largest sum ever committed for a North American sports franchise at the time of the deal. The team also owns 18 championships, more than any other NBA club.

Chisholm, who grew up in Massachusetts, is a managing partner at the private equity firm Symphony Technology Group. He bought out the ownership group that Wyc Grousbeck, his father Irving Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca assembled to buy the club in 2002 for $360 million. Wyc Grousbeck stayed on as team governor through a transition period, a structure that now shows up regularly in the largest sports sales, where the league office values continuity alongside the check.

The Celtics do not own their building, which sets them apart from several franchises ranked near them. TD Garden belongs to Delaware North, the Jacobs family company that also owns the NHL's Bruins, so Boston pays rent rather than collecting it and sees none of the concert and event income that flows to teams such as the Warriors and Nets. The valuation rests instead on the brand, basketball revenue and a fan base spread across six New England states.

The banners still carry commercial weight. Boston won the 2008 title with Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, then won again in 2024 with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. The roster that followed that second championship carried one of the heaviest payroll and luxury tax bills in league history, and the penalties attached to the collective bargaining agreement's second apron pushed the front office to move Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis in the summer of 2025, after Tatum tore his Achilles tendon during that spring's playoffs.

Cost control now sits at the center of the new ownership's math. A record price raises both the debt attached to the franchise and the expectations that come with it, while the current labor rules make years of heavy spending harder to sustain than they were for the previous owners.

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The Brooklyn Nets hold a place among the NBA's more valuable franchises because owner Joe Tsai controls both the team and Barclays Center, the arena it plays in. The Alibaba co-founder bought a 49% stake in the club in 2017, then took full control in 2019 by buying out Mikhail Prokhorov.

Arena ownership changes the math for a franchise. Most NBA clubs lease their buildings, which routes a share of concert, family show and other non-basketball income to a separate landlord. Tsai acquired the company that operates Barclays Center along with the team, so that money stays inside his own portfolio. Only a handful of NBA owners hold that combined position.

His sports holdings reach beyond the men's game. Tsai also owns the WNBA's New York Liberty, which plays at Barclays Center and won the 2024 WNBA title, giving the building a second professional tenant under the same ownership rather than a competing commercial relationship.

The roster has run through an entire cycle during that stretch. Brooklyn landed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving in the summer of 2019 and traded for James Harden in January 2021, assembling a trio widely treated as a title favorite before injuries, absences and Irving's trade request pulled it apart. Harden was dealt in February 2022. Durant and Irving both moved in February 2023. The franchise has rebuilt around draft capital since, including a stockpile of future first-round picks collected in those trades.

None of that churn knocked the valuation down for long. Brooklyn sits inside the New York metropolitan area, the biggest media market in the U.S., and operates there alongside the Knicks instead of in a secondary one. Tsai's personal fortune and his control of the arena give the club a financial base that does not move with the standings. The Nets show how ownership structure and geography can hold a franchise's price steady through a rebuild.

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Steve Ballmer paid $2 billion for the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014, a record for an NBA team at the time, then spent roughly $2 billion more on Intuit $INTU Dome, the Inglewood, California, arena he financed privately and opened in 2024. Owning the building outright reset the franchise's economics.

That 2014 sale followed a scandal rather than a planned auction. The NBA banned Donald Sterling for life after recordings of his racist remarks became public, and the forced sale drew bids from several billionaires. Ballmer, who had stepped down as Microsoft $MSFT's chief executive earlier that year, won with a figure that reset price expectations across the league.

For more than two decades before the move to Inglewood, the Clippers rented. They were the third tenant at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, behind the Lakers and the NHL's Kings, an arrangement that complicated scheduling and left the money from concerts, award shows and other bookings with the building's operator. Intuit Dome changed that. The campus holds a practice facility, team offices, retail space and a halo-shaped video board suspended over the court, all of it under team control.

Results on the floor have not matched the balance sheet. The Clippers have never played in an NBA Finals, the longest such wait among the league's large-market teams. The rosters built around Kawhi Leonard and Paul George produced a single conference finals appearance, in 2021, and injuries cut short the seasons that looked most promising. The valuation climbed regardless.

Ballmer's fortune, tied largely to his Microsoft stake, gives the organization room to absorb luxury-tax bills and keep spending on the Inglewood campus, which sits near SoFi Stadium and the Kia Forum. The Clippers are one of the few NBA franchises whose financial case rests more on venue control and surrounding real estate than on banners.

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The Chicago Bulls rank among the NBA's 10 most valuable franchises on the strength of brand, market scale and arena control rather than recent results — the team has not won a playoff series since 2015 or reached a conference final since 2011. Jerry Reinsdorf's group has owned the club since 1985, one of the longest tenures of any owner in the league.

Six championships between 1991 and 1998, won with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen under coach Phil Jackson, gave the Bulls a level of worldwide recognition few American sports teams have reached. That era still moves merchandise and jerseys abroad decades later. The Bulls played a regular season game against the Detroit Pistons in Paris in January 2023, one of the league's showcase international dates.

Chicago is the third-largest television market in the U.S., and the Bulls play in one of the biggest buildings in the NBA. The United Center opened in 1994 and seats roughly 20,900 for basketball. The team has ranked among the league's attendance leaders in seasons when it missed the playoffs entirely.

Who owns the building counts as much as who fills it. The Bulls and the NHL's Blackhawks jointly own and operate the United Center, so concert dates, hockey nights and other bookings feed a revenue stream the basketball team shares in directly rather than surrendering to a landlord.

Local broadcasting changed in 2024, when the Bulls, the Blackhawks and Reinsdorf's Chicago White Sox left NBC Sports Chicago and launched Chicago Sports Network, a channel the three teams own together. That gives them control of their local rights distribution at a point when regional sports networks across the country have lost subscribers and gone through bankruptcy proceedings.

The roster has spent recent seasons caught between a rebuild and a play-in seed without committing to either. The underlying asset has not moved with it. Market size, a co-owned arena, a team-controlled broadcast outlet and a 1990s brand that never faded keep Chicago's valuation far ahead of its position in the standings.

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Tilman Fertitta's $2.2 billion purchase of the Houston Rockets in 2017 set an NBA record at the time, and that price still anchors how the market reads the franchise going into 2026. Fertitta bought the club from Leslie Alexander, who had owned it since 1993.

His money comes from hospitality. Fertitta controls Landry's, the parent company of restaurant brands including Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and Morton's The Steakhouse, along with the Golden Nugget casino business. Those companies operate in food service, entertainment and premium hospitality — the same categories that fill an arena's revenue lines on nights when no game is scheduled.

The Rockets play at Toyota $TM Center in downtown Houston, the fourth-largest city in the U.S. The metro area's corporate base leans heavily toward energy companies. That cluster of large local headquarters supports suite sales and sponsorship inventory even through losing seasons. A franchise's financial floor rests more on those contracts than on playoff gate receipts.

Houston also carries an international following built during Yao Ming's career, when the Rockets became the NBA's most popular team in China. That relationship broke down in 2019, after then-general manager Daryl Morey posted support for Hong Kong protesters. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV pulled Rockets games, and the fallout cost the league broadcast and sponsorship revenue in its largest overseas market.

The basketball operation reset after Houston traded James Harden to the Brooklyn Nets in January 2021. The front office stockpiled draft capital and young players, then hired Ime Udoka as head coach in 2023. The team returned to the playoffs as a top seed in the Western Conference. Houston traded for Kevin Durant in the summer of 2025, turning a rebuild into a contending roster.

Two titles, won in 1994 and 1995 behind Hakeem Olajuwon, give the franchise a championship record that several higher-valued teams lack. Fertitta ranks among the league's more visible owners and comments publicly on roster direction and league business. That involvement has not slowed the climb in the team's value since 2017.

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The Philadelphia 76ers sit in the upper-middle tier of NBA franchise values, and the factor most likely to move that number is the arena deal the team struck with Comcast $CMCSA Spectacor in January 2025 to build a new venue at the South Philadelphia sports complex. Josh Harris and David Blitzer lead the ownership group, which bought the club in 2011 for about $280 million.

That purchase price measures how far league valuations have traveled in roughly 15 years. Harris and Blitzer run Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment, which also controls the NHL's New Jersey Devils and Prudential $PRU Center in Newark. Harris separately led the investor group that bought the NFL's Washington Commanders in 2023, and both men have held stakes in European soccer, including Crystal Palace. That portfolio gives the 76ers access to financing and venue-operating experience a single-team owner rarely has.

The arena plan took a sharp turn before it landed. The group spent years promoting 76 Place, a privately financed building planned for Market East in Center City, and Philadelphia's City Council approved the project in December 2024. Weeks later the 76ers dropped the downtown site and announced a joint venture with Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Wells Fargo $WFC Center and the Flyers, to develop a new arena at the existing South Philadelphia complex. The Center City proposal had drawn sustained opposition, much of it from residents and business owners in the neighboring Chinatown district.

A joint venture changes the economics from what a standalone, wholly owned building would deliver, since a shared arena splits the non-basketball revenue a sole owner would keep. It also removes the uncertainty of a contested site and pairs the team with a partner that already runs a major venue business in the city.

The 76ers play at the Wells Fargo Center in the meantime, sharing it with the Flyers. On the court, the franchise has built around center Joel Embiid, the league's Most Valuable Player for the 2022-23 season, without reaching a conference final during his career. Philadelphia has not played in one since 2001. The city remains a top-10 U.S. media market, and the regional following across the Delaware Valley supports the valuation regardless of playoff results.