NBA restructures front office with an eye on finding growth beyond basketball as new media deal approaches

Brooks and her team will look for investment and acquisition opportunities for the league.NBA

To prepare for a future that will include a new media rights deal and presumably two expansion teams, the NBA spent December revamping much of its executive ladder. One by one, there was a tap on a shoulder, a walk into Commissioner Adam Silver’s or Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum’s office and five promotions that the league kept relatively under the radar.

But make no mistake: The NBA is openly looking past 2024 and into a world where its tentacles know no bounds. When the media rights money starts pouring in — or maybe before — the league wants its business aims, according to Tatum, to be more “proactive” than “reactive.” Which led to the first tap on the shoulder in December … for Amy Brooks.

Brooks, a 2014 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree, is the former Stanford basketball player who played in the Final Four, who later earned her Stanford MBA, who joined the NBA 19 years ago, and who set attendance and sell-out records while directing the league’s team marketing and business operations unit (TMBO). Factoring that in, Silver created a position for Brooks to identify ways for the NBA to extend its brand.

The job title became president, new business ventures, and the idea was that Brooks (and her team) would search globally for investments or acquisitions of companies and products that could turn the NBA into more than just a basketball league. The job was, in an indirect way, inspired by Amazon.

“If you look at, for example, Amazon Prime,” Tatum said while in Indianapolis for the All-Star Game, “Amazon Prime started off as a bookseller. And now they’ve gone into you-name-it: into grocery, they’ve gone into, obviously, video. So many different things. I’m not saying that we modeled this after Amazon. But that’s the kind of example that we’re thinking about, where the NBA brand right now is a basketball league and is obviously our core business. But we’re thinking about, what are the other new ventures and areas of the NBA brand we can get into?

“I don’t want to necessarily get into specific hypotheticals, but look at things like the Top Golf concept — and if there was a basketball equivalent, for example. Things in the youth space, in the grassroots space. You can start reimagining those sorts of business opportunities that are out there that might apply to the NBA and might apply to basketball.”

Tatum said the promotion of Brooks from president of TMBO was designed to “send the message to the organization that we’re serious about this,” and, from that point on, the biggest league office restructuring in half a decade was underway. In what amounted to a domino effect, Silver and Tatum started tapping four more people on the shoulder, one being Jonathan Tillman.

Tillman, a former Milwaukee Bucks ball boy and understudy to Brooks, became executive vice president of TMBO and was immediately sent to Miami in early January to lead his first sales-marketing meeting. Calling it “a bit surreal” and a “milestone moment,” Tillman stepped on the Miami stage with only a few weeks to prepare and delivered a keynote address, emphasizing how important data, content and future direct-to-consumer products were to the NBA.

“I have to tell you, he got up there and he nailed it,” Tatum said. “Nailed it.”

Tillman had Matt Wolf, just appointed executive vice president, chief data and analytics officer, as a resource at the meetings. It was another new title created by Silver and Co., in which Wolf would be tasked with perfecting the direct-to-consumer component Tillman was touting. The league, for instance, has been leaning on NBA ID to collect intel about its subscribers, and Tatum said Wolf and his team would “analyze that data and crunch that data and give us the insights that we can utilize in order to engage with those fans.’’

An unnamed team executive who attended the meeting called Wolf’s data illuminating — the analytics clearly identifying how to monetize an NBA audience. “Whether it’s a fan trying to buy a team jersey from Bombay,” said the executive, “or a fan who actually attended a game or whether it was a fan who attended some concert and saw our branding or a fan who was on a corporate sponsor’s — like PepsiCo’s — website who also had an affinity for basketball. [The league] explained how we can take all of that data, append it together and figure out how we can grow from there.”

Wolf is famous in the league office for his dashboards that aggregate NBA ID, viewership and social media metrics. But his new job led to a simultaneous promotion for Samantha Engelhardt, whose role as head of global strategy and business operations expanded. Tatum said Engelhardt, who is responsible for the analytics behind the launches of the Play-In and In-Season tournaments and Basketball Africa League, had reported to Wolf and Brooks, but would now report to Tatum in even more of an innovative-centric position.

A fifth and final restructure involved Scott Kaufman-Ross, who had been senior vice president, gaming and new business ventures, and with two of those ventures being fantasy and sports betting. But Tatum said Kaufman-Ross’ new role as executive vice president, media and gaming, has him working closely now with Bill Koenig, president of global content and media distribution, on the impending media rights negotiations, which is ultimately the impetus for all the restructuring.

“Adam and I ... with the media deals coming up, it was, ‘Hey, this is a great time to really think about — with the business doing well —  ‘What’s the next opportunity?’’’ Tatum said. “I think the timing was right.’’