Time to hurry up and wait. As the week began, most of us had never heard of Robert Pera, the 34-year-old one-time billionaire tech entrepreneur who is now bidding to buy the Memphis Grizzlies.
Four days later, Pera has an initial agreement in place with current owner Michael Heisley, including a reportedly $10 million deposit, and has not been heard from beyond a canned quote in a team press release.
Pera’s purchase bid is in the hands of the NBA, where a vetting process will lead to an ultimate decision by the league’s Board of Governors on whether to approve the purchase. The league may not seriously begin the vetting process until after the Finals. The endgame isn’t likely to come for another couple of months and if Pera’s really not going to submit himself to local inspection for awhile, this story might not move much until then.
Like everyone else, I’ve got a lot of questions. And, like everyone else, I don’t have much in the way of answers. But I’ll give it a shot:
How seriously should we take the Pera bid?
The two names mentioned most frequently as a comparison for Pera have been the Brian Davis/Christian Laettner tandem that attempted to purchase the Grizzlies a few years ago and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. This makes sense to a degree: The Davis/Laettner duo is the only prospective buyer who has made it this far in the process in the all the years Heisley has been trying to sell the team, and Pera fits the rough Cuban mold of being a young self-made tech tycoon.
