Tim Leiweke is chief executive of AEG, which owns the Kings and an array of sports and entertainment venues and companies around the world. He is the Kings governor and an avid fan, but his main focus now is overseeing the development of LA Live, the $2.5-billion sports-entertainment-residential complex downtown.
He sat with The Times recently and discussed the state of the team.
Does part of what you have going on include selling part of the club?
No.
Then have you retrenched on that, or is it still a possibility?
I know people are out there saying, 'They're going to sell the club.' We're not out looking to sell the club. It's not for sale. We had somebody call us who wanted to buy in. They've gone away. Others have now kind of jumped in saying, 'Can we talk to you?' and we've said no.
So I'm not sure if the fans will be sad or happy. I understand the frustration with us, but I'm hoping what they also understand is we took a club that went through two bankruptcies. We've never had an issue financially with this club. You can question our management, and yes there are times we've made mistakes on management, but the one thing we have always done is bring financial stability back to the club. Good times, bad times. Losses -- we haven't had profits, despite what Forbes says.
But the reality is, the best thing for this club right now is I don't know too many other owners that would allow their general manager to spend $100 million like we just did. We have one more contract hopefully he's going to get done, but the reality is, count the amount of money we just spent here in the last couple of months, and assuming he gets one more guy done, it's close to $100 million we spent as an organization.
Most people will look at the short term and say, "Oh, but the budget is only $42 million or whatever and they're cheap."
The budget's only $42 million because if you look at all this money we just spent, we had to have the room to spend it. And so there's one thing [General Manager] Dean [Lombardi] is extremely good at, it's charts. He will sit there and ponder for days at a time where we're at position by position and budget over the next five years. And when you spend the kind of money we just spent, tying the guys up that we tied up, you'd better make sure that you're in a position where you can budget it, afford it and keep everyone together under the cap. We did and we're pretty happy about that.
