NEW YORK — NBA commissioner Adam Silver said Tuesday the league found no red flags when it vetted Mark Walter to become principal governor of the Los Angeles Lakers, and he learned Walter planned to sell the team only when the buyers told him they had a handshake deal.
Silver spoke after the NBA Board of Governors met Monday and Tuesday in New York.
Adam Silver On Mark Walter’s Vetting And The Lakers Sale
The NBA was not investigating Walter when he agreed to sell the Lakers.
“I would say at the time that we vetted Mark Walter to be the principal governor of the team, again, he was already a part owner, a minority owner in the Los Angeles Lakers, went through the full process we all do,” Silver said. “We spoke to governmental agencies. We spoke to, in the case of Mark Walter, in a heavily regulated insurance industry, we spoke to other leagues in which he has investments, and we found no red flags.”
“And again, even to this day, as you know, these are, call them allegations,” Silver continued. “There are issues that are now being looked into, but independent of Mark Walter choosing to sell his team right now, he was not being investigated by our league. I don’t know what’s happening in other leagues right now. But maybe to answer your question differently, I had no prior notion that he was intending to sell his team until I heard from the buyers that they had a handshake with him.”
Walter had been a minority owner of the Lakers since 2021. He agreed in June 2025 to buy the controlling stake from the Buss family at a $10 billion valuation, and Jeanie Buss stayed on as the team’s governor.
In August, Walter agreed to sell his majority stake to Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner at a reported price of $12.5 billion. Iger and Kushner had been reported as interested in a Las Vegas expansion team, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission are examining whether Walter or his businesses hid financial ties while borrowing billions of dollars from insurers he controls, Forbes reported, citing The Wall Street Journal.
Walter’s TWG Global said in an Aug. 26 statement that there had been no fraud and that it is working with the Justice Department and the SEC, CNBC reported. TWG also said the Los Angeles Dodgers are not being sold.
Adam Silver On The NBA’s Ownership Vetting Process
Much of the league’s vetting work is database searching, often done state by state.
“Interesting the way you put it. I’ve never heard it quite that way,” Silver explained. “I understand that with team ownership comes a platform, both for individual owners, and helps them become widely known. But I also think it imposes responsibilities on them in their communities. It’s one of the things we talked about today in terms of what comes with team ownership.”
“I would only say, and this has even come up in your reporting, just as there are limits to what a reporter is able to do,” Silver continued. “Some ways reporters can do things that traditional investigators can’t because you can, in some cases, keep all your sources confidential. I think there’s different transparency obligations on leagues and also maybe a different set of actors’ willingness to talk directly to leagues. But we take the vetting process very seriously.”
“A lot of what we do is intensive database searching,” Silver added. “You would think in this day and age with AI and everything else that everything is centralized. It’s not. In many cases, you’re going state by state. In certain cases, people are part of industries that are regulated state by state, so you have to look there as well. We also talk to as many people as we can find who have knowledge about these people, and we do interviews. But beyond that, I will say we’re always reassessing to see if we can do more.”
“But in fairness to the parties involved, even Mark Walter, as we sit here today, I know no more about him than I did when we vetted him,” Silver noted. “I read newspaper articles, but in fairness to him, I don’t know where those investigations are going to come out. I don’t know where any government inquiries are going to come out. So, again, I guess we’re always seeing if we can do things better, but I don’t see a trend or some widespread issue, certainly among our principal owners, that gives me cause for concern.”
Walter also owns the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks and holds stakes in Chelsea FC, the Professional Women’s Hockey League, and the Cadillac Formula 1 team.
The Lakers visit the Dallas Mavericks at American Airlines Center on Feb. 28. Dallas plays at Los Angeles on March 21 and April 6.
