Madison Square Garden Sports (MSGS) shares are rocking, just like the Garden in New York City will be soon for the NBA Finals.
The news: Shares of the owner of the New York Knicks and Rangers rose 3% in premarket trading following the Knicks’ sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers late Monday. The win will send the Knicks to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999.
A trip down memory lane: The timing of Knicks’ return to the finals has an eerie feeling from a stock market perspective.
In May 1999, the Knicks faced a playoff battle against its arch rival, the Indiana Pacers, which led to them facing the San Antonio Spurs in the finals (and losing). Right as the Knicks were dueling the Reggie Miller-led Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals, eToys.com went public.
In a classic sign of the tech bubble times, the stock debuted at $28, skyrocketed to $76 on its first day, and instantly commanded a $7.7 billion valuation — making the loss-generating website worth more than the bricks-and-mortar toy giant Toys “R” Us.
Hype, “eyeballs,” and mind-share were completely replacing traditional metrics like profit or cash flow in late 1999. As we know, it all literally came crashing down months later.
The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) hit a high of 5,048 on March 10, 2000. From that peak, the Nasdaq began a brutal, prolonged sell-off, ultimately losing nearly 78% of its value by the time it bottomed out in October 2002.
Today, the Knicks enter the NBA finals amid the artificial intelligence boom that has shares of Micron (MU), Sandisk (SNDK), and Palantir (PLTR) trading at eye-watering valuations. Similar to the dot-com hype, investors are readying for splashy IPOs this year from SpaceX (SPAX.PVT) and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) — two tech beasts also not making any money.
In case you missed it: Madison Square Garden Sports recently filed a Form 10 registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the proposed spin-off of the NY Rangers from the NY Knicks. In February, the company’s board, led by James Dolan, approved a plan to explore a split to unlock shareholder value.
“Based on team values from Forbes and Sportico, shares are currently pricing in a ~40% discount to private market valuation,” JPMorgan analyst David Karnovsky said in a recent note. “Put another way, at a current enterprise value of ~ $8.0 billion, shareholders appear to be receiving the Knicks at a ~20% sale price and the Rangers for free, creating downside protection, in our view. We expect the gap to present market value to narrow over time and for team values to move higher, driven by long- term revenue trends, the continued scarcity of trophy assets, and a new class of institutional investors entering the professional team space.”