It strikes me that a lot of people are setting themselves up to get their hearts broken. There’s the obvious issue — that circumstances may change and Cohan may not sell — but there’s also the additional problem that no one dares mention: that a new owner might not be any kind of panacea.

The problem with Cohan is not penny-pinching. Cohan is willing to spend about as much as anyone on a non-championship-level team. Smart teams don’t go into the luxury tax for sub-50 win rosters… I don’t blame Cohan for avoiding the tax. He allows the salary level to go up to the tax, and no further. That’s all you can realistically ask. He’s also willing to spend a lot on a coach. Atma listed three trades as “salary dumps” above — I think all three were smart basketball trades. The cap is a genuine limitation; your assets are not infinite. You should dump overpriced players so that you can get better ones.

“But,” some might say. “Look at Mark Cuban. Look at Paul Allen. They’re so rich, they don’t even CARE!” By this theory, Larry Ellison will break the bank and take us to the promised land. And Larry Ellison is indeed rich — by God, he’s LOADED. But so are lots of owners who don’t break the bank for the franchises they own. Mark Cuban’s an outlier because of his spending, not this wealth. Hell, Cohan has lots more money than Peter Holt, who owns the Spurs. Glen Taylor, the Wolves’ owner, has huge amounts of money… you’d never know it from the team. Owners are generally very savvy, cold-hearted businesspeople. The great majority of them do not spend limitless money out of sheer fandom… most run their franchises like businesspeople. Like Chris Cohan.

Cohan’s failing has never been financial… the dollars and cents have actually added up pretty decently during his tenure. His failing has been structural. He does not personally present himself as the top dog of the franchise, using Rowell as a de facto owner instead… Cyrano-style management like that doesn’t tend to work well. Cohan has shown no ability to figure out who to hire on the basketball side… his best GM hire, Chris Mullin, was a PR hire who was fireably bad for a couple years before turning things around, and his best coaching hire, Nellie, came through Mullin twisting his arm. In addition, there has been no clear mission statement for the franchise in years. Are we playing for now? For the future? Who are we building around? These answers seem to change by not just the year, but the month. That doesn’t happen on a well-managed team.

So the question isn’t, “would Larry Ellison be richer”. The question is, “would Larry Ellison set up a structure that works.” And frankly, that’s anybody’s guess. Portland works because Paul Allen found a very skilled GM and stays the hell out of his way… Dallas works because Mark Cuban, though a meddler, is a genuinely knowledgeable meddler. But there are many, many scenarios in which a billionaire dotcom owner would not be a positive. Is Larry Ellison a student of the game? If not, is he smart enough to know it? If the answers to both questions is “no”, he won’t be any better than Cohan. And I’d venture a guess that we have no idea how Larry Ellison would run an NBA team… his career at Oracle featured some real brilliance and some pretty huge mistakes. He might be the nuanced, patient owner an NBA team needs, or he might tire of his new plaything quickly and tune out. You never know.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for Cohan selling… it’s not likely that we’d get a significantly worse owner, and Ellison would probably be fairly entertaining, if nothing else. But the size of his boat and his entertainment center don’t mean anything one way or another. We don’t need an owner with more dollars — we need an owner with more sense.