Foley, Maloof biz relationship sparked Las Vegas NHL push

Joe Maloof chomped down on his hamburger, and laughter spilled from his mouth between the next bites.

Maloof, as he enjoys doing, was in full-bore, animated story­telling mode during a recent lunch at the Four Seasons on the Strip.

Maloof, a former National Basketball Association team owner, was explaining how long it took to recharge his batteries after selling the NBA Sacramento Kings two years ago. Lately he’s dived into his family’s latest sports project — teaming up with Florida mortgage company billionaire Bill Foley to launch a National Hockey League team in Las Vegas.

“We did decompress the minute the Kings were sold,” Maloof said.

Then, Joe’s brother, Gavin, chimed in: “It took 24 hours to decompress and we were in Bettman’s office.”

Now, the two Maloofs were laughing.

SCHMOOZING WITH FANS

Bettman is NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman, who visited Las Vegas on Feb. 10 when Foley, chairman of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Fidelity National Financial, launched a season ticket deposit drive to show Bettman and NHL team owners that the Las Vegas market is worthy of hosting an NHL team.

Joe Maloof said his family has known Bettman since 1978, when he worked in the NBA as a former senior vice president and general counsel.

In Las Vegas, Foley is the lead NHL team investor and would serve as the prospective team’s managing partner, owning 80 percent of the team.

His minority partners are the Maloof brothers — Joe, Gavin, George and Phil, who have the equity to help Foley kick-start an NHL club in Las Vegas.

Joe, 59, and Gavin, 58, are doing what they do best — schmoozing with Las Vegas Valley sports fans and pitching them on paying $150 to $900 for a season ticket deposit, or 10 percent of a season ticket deal. The goal is 10,000 deposits.

Joe and Gavin wear Las Vegas hockey sweater jerseys and quick smiles on the meet-and-greet circuit. In the past few weeks, they’ve hit everything from a youth hockey league in Spring Valley and a Chicago-themed sports bar in the southern valley to the Italian-American club on Las Vegas’ east side.

“It’s great to have the Maloofs back in the sports scene,” said Southern Highlands developer Garry Goett, a hockey fan who has paid 14 season ticket deposits and hosted a fan gathering last week at the Southern Highlands Country Club.

The Maloof brothers are returning to sports after selling the Kings to a local Sacramento group for an announced $535 million in May 2013. The Maloofs had bought the NBA team for $238 million in 1998.

Joe and Gavin said they ultimately received $585 million in the transaction, after adjustments.

“It was the right time to sell. After 15 years, we had a great run,” Joe Maloof said. “It was time to move on.”

ROCKETING TO FAME

The Maloofs are well-versed in sports ownership.

In 1980, when he was just 24, Gavin Maloof became owner of the Houston Rockets after his father, Coors distributing magnate George Maloof Sr., died of a heart attack.

The elder Maloof, who died at age 57, bought the Rockets for $9 million in 1979. He was the Coors distributor for New Mexico and left a reported $125 million fortune. The family lived in Albuquerque.

In 1981, the Maloof boys rode the Rockets’ run to the NBA Finals, which ended with a 4-2 best-of-7 series loss to the Boston Celtics.

Gavin Maloof remembers the first round of that magical playoff run. It began with the Rockets’ upset of the power­ful Los Angeles Lakers, which had superstars Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

After Houston beat the Lakers in the deciding game in Los Angeles, Gavin went to celebrate with players in the Rockets locker room. But he didn’t have a credential and was kept out by security.

“The security asked me where was I going and I told him I was going to congratulate my players. He asked me, ‘What do you mean your players?’ and I told him I own the team. He said, “And I’m the president.’ I never did get in there.”

The Maloofs sold the Rockets in 1982 for $11 million.

MAJOR LEAGUE DREAMS

By the 1990s, the Maloof brothers were hungry to own a another major-league team.

“The minute we sold the Rockets, we wanted another team,” said Joe Maloof, who lives in Las Vegas’ Lakes area. Gavin lives in Southern Highlands.

By 1998, they had two prospects. The Maloofs were mulling buying the NHL’s Tampa Bay Lightning for $150 million or the NBA’s Kings for $238 million.

The brothers were so close to closing a deal for the Lightning that Gavin’s car was already in a vehicle transporter parked in front of his Spanish Trail home.

“I thought I was moving to Tampa,” Gavin said.

But then he read the deal’s final feasibility report.

“Even if the Lightning sold out every game, we would lose money,” he said. “We called and said we were no longer interested. We couldn’t make money.”

Hello Sacramento Kings.

PUMPING UP THE GAME

The Maloofs’ tenure in Sacramento was a roller-coaster ride. They had purchased a moribund club with a 27-55 record in 1997-98.

Fortunes had turned by the 2001-02 season, when the Kings posted an NBA-best 61-21 record and reached the Western Conference Finals. The eventual NBA champion Los Angeles Lakers won that series in the deciding seventh game.

The Kings, which enjoyed 354 straight sellouts at its Arco Arena, had returned to mediocrity by the 2008-09 season, finishing 17-65.

Besides the Kings, the Maloofs have owned the WNBA’s Sacramento Monarchs, the Sacramento Knights of the World Indoor Soccer League and the Birmingham Fire in the World League of American Football. They have also held ownership and marketing partnership stakes in boxing, horse racing, car racing and mixed martial arts.

In 2008, Joe Maloof created a skateboarding championship called the Maloof Money Cup for professional and amateur skateboarders. Joe Maloof said he paid $500,000 in purses, with $100,000 going to the title winner. Maloof Money Cups were staged in California, New York and South Africa.

“He just looked out the window and saw all the skateboarders in Huntington Beach,” Gavin Maloof said, explaining why his brother launched the skateboarder championships.

The Maloofs were popular in Sacramento. But then they asked for public dollars to build a new Kings arena. And, as Joe Maloof put it, “a political bloodbath” followed.

Intense controversy and political heat followed the Maloofs’ request for a quarter-cent sales tax increase for 15 years to build a new arena. After 80 percent of the voters crushed the sales tax proposal in 2006, the Maloofs angered fans even more by talking to Anaheim, Calif., officials about moving the club to Southern California.

The ugly politics led to the Maloofs’ sale of the team.

There is no such arena squabble in Las Vegas, where partners MGM Resorts Inter­national and Anschutz Entertainment Group are privately financing an arena for a possible NHL team.

The $375 million arena is slated to open in April 2016. Foley has already cut a lease deal with MGM-AEG, with hopes of starting the NHL club in fall 2016.

FUN-LOVING WAYS

Joe and Gavin have two other brothers — George, 50, a UNLV graduate who launched the Palms in Las Vegas and Philip, 47, whom Joe calls the most reserved of the brothers.

The Brothers Maloof, all of whom are never-married bachelors, enjoy a good time, so it’s not unusual that they are now selling an anti-hangover product called Never Hungover. (“Party tonight, feel great tomorrow!” according to its Twitter account.)

Plus, there’s middle sister Adrienne, 53, who stars on the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” TV show.

The Maloof siblings’ fun-loving ways belie a serious approach to business.

The Maloofs bought the Fiesta in North Las Vegas in 1994 for a reported $8 million and then sold it for $185 million in 2000, plowing the money into the Palms the following year.

The Maloofs marketed the Palms as an off-Strip destination for a younger crowd, celebrities and sports stars, hosting Shaquille O’Neal’s retirement party and the NHL awards show. On the hotel’s opening night in 2001, George Maloof had Paris Hilton as his date while movie stars Matt Dillon, Samuel L. Jackson and Charlize Theron came to party.

George Maloof added to the party place allure by luring MTV to film its popular “The Real World” TV show in a Palms penthouse suite. The show generated free publicity for the 1,300-room hotel-casino and gave the Maloofs a reputation as clever marketers beyond sports.

But not all of the Palms’ headlines were positive.

In January 2013, the hotel’s parent company, FP Holdings L.P., agreed to pay a $1 million fine to settle a Nevada Gaming Control Board complaint that focused on a failure by the Palms to prevent illegal activity, including drug sales and prostitution, at clubs on the property.

And, about two years earlier, the Palms had become weighed down by $400 million in debt. So, a debt restructuring with private equity firms TPG Capital and Leonard Green and Partners reduced the Maloofs’ 85 percent ownership stake in the hotel-casino to 2 percent.

In 2009, the Maloofs had sold its longtime family-owned New Mexico Coors distributorship, Joe G. Maloof Co., to generate cash to help with the Palms and the family’s sports properties.

MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER …

In 2013, after the Kings sale, Joe and Gavin were again pining to own a big-league team. So their California sports lawyer, Scott Zolke, played matchmaker.

Zolke’s law firm knew Foley, a 1967 West Point graduate who owned a mortgage company in Florida, wineries in California and land development projects in Montana. Zolke told the Maloofs they might find an ownership match with Foley.

So, Joe and Gavin traveled to Jacksonville to meet with 69-year-old Foley. The rapport was instant.

“We knew we’d get along,” Gavin Maloof said, recalling Foley’s relaxed, friendly demeanor.

The Foley-Maloof courtship took about 18 months before they clinched the partnership deal. Foley would be the public face of the possible Las Vegas NHL team, while the Maloofs would focus on their specialty niche — sales, marketing and customer service.

Joe and Gavin say they are ready to be part-owners of a team again.

“Who has thicker skin than us?” Joe Maloof asked.

Contact reporter Alan Snel at asnel@reviewjournal or 702-387-5273.