PhillyDeals: Philadelphia 76ers have large roster of new owners

Who are these guys?

The new 76ers owners, who purchased the team from Comcast-Spectacor, include overlapping circles of University of Pennsylvania grads, Philly natives, and Wall Street moguls who got rich during (and after) the long economic boom that crashed in 2008.

Plus Hollywood people. A couple of veteran sports businessmen. And the Indonesians.

As a group they are led by Wharton School grads Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management L.L.C., and David Blitzer, of the Blackstone Group.

Apollo has a long record of buying big, complicated, troubled companies cheaply and reorganizing them to sell at a profit. It invested in subprime home lending in the 1990s, got out before the crash, then made billions buying up deeply discounted loans from troubled banks in 2008, before markets stabilized.

Blackstone, cofounded in 1985 by Stephen A. Schwarzman of Abington (the high school field there is named for him), is one of the world's biggest real estate managers. Clients include the Pennsylvania state workers' and teachers' pension systems.

Harris and Blitzer brought on Adam Aron, former head of Vail Resorts in Colorado, as chief executive. Their minor partners include:

More Wall Streeters: Goldman Sachs partner David Heller, financial adviser Martin Geller, Travis Hennings, who works for Harris' firm, and Art Wrubel, a real estate hedge-fund manager (and Penn grad) are also new Sixers owners.

Another buyout guy: Marc Leder, a Penn grad and boss at Sun Capital Partners in Boca Raton, Fla., is in the same business as Harris - buying troubled companies at a discount and turning them around.

Leder's staff knows its way around Philadelphia - or its South Jersey suburbs, at least. In 2008,  Sun shut Jevic Transportation Co., a nonunion trucking company and Burlington County's largest blue-collar employer, idling 1,900.  But Leder's firm also takes credit for the 2008 reorganization of a string of troubled U.S. paper plants into Philadelphia-based PaperWorks Inc., a move the firm says kept its Manayunk plant and others open.

The Hollywood group: Actor Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, are also members of the 76ers' new ownership group. So is James Lassiter, a film producer who has been a partner in Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment since the 1990s. That guarantees some A-list celebrities at courtside. At least during the playoffs.

The sports guys: Pro sports agent Jason Levien is expected to take a lead role in the Sixers' rebuilding efforts.

Michael Rubin, a lifelong Philadelphian, owns Football Fanatics, which calls itself the largest online seller of sports merchandise in the world through deals with the NBA, NFL, NHL, Major League Baseball, the NCAA, and dozens of other outfits. Rubin built up the business over the last 25 years, since he began selling sporting goods as a teenager.

Rubin recently sold one of his companies, publicly traded GSI Commerce of King of Prussia, to eBay for a total of $2.4 billion. Being an NBA owner will likely give him new insight on how to sell pro-brand gear.

From Indonesia: The group also includes two pioneering Asian investors, Handy Soetedjo, an Indonesian investor who has backed Asian basketball leagues, and Erick Thohir, an Indonesian media mogul and basketball fan.

As noted in Saturday's Inquirer, Matchbin, an online media-software company in Salt Lake City, has purchased operations supporting Traffic.com from Nokia's Navteq in Malvern, and hired 191 Navteq employees. Those employees will be combined with Matchbin's own 55 workers. The new company will be called Radiate Media. Chris Rothey will head Radiate, according to former Matchbin chief executive Hal Widlansky, who remains with the company.

Navteq, which had previously planned to close the Malvern location and move the work out of state, idling a total of 300, sent me a statement Tuesday saying it would continue to own the Traffic.com website but would buy data, services, and advertising sales from Rothey's group.