Mark Walter is selling teams. The PWHL deserves one sentence
The Sparks are on the market after the Lakers and Chelsea sales, and Walter's group still hasn't said a word about the league he owns outright.
Mark Walter has now sold or shopped three of his teams since August, and the only one nobody has asked out loud about is the one he owns outright. The PWHL deserves a straight answer before its biggest season starts, not a no-comment.
What he's moved
Walter sold his majority stake in the Lakers in August at a $12.5 billion valuation, less than a year after buying in. Later that month he sold a stake of nearly 13% in Chelsea.
Now the Sparks, his WNBA team since 2014, are on the market with their new practice facility, at an asking price said to be around $700 million.
What he's keeping, by his own group's word, is the Dodgers and the Cadillac Formula 1 team. TWG Global said in late August that neither would be sold.
That statement didn't mention the PWHL. TWG didn't answer questions about the league's future then, and it didn't answer them on Friday either.
Why that silence matters here
The PWHL isn't one team in a portfolio. It's the whole league, solely owned by Walter since he bought in during 2023, with Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss as co-founders.
One owner means one checkbook. That's what let the league build fast: two new teams last year, four more this offseason in Detroit, Hamilton, Las Vegas and San Jose. That's 12 teams in year four.
That same structure is the risk. If the owner of every team decides to sell, there's no other group of owners to absorb it. A single-entity league can't trade one franchise to a buyer down the street.
The backdrop doesn't help. A federal investigation into Guggenheim Partners' chief and his insurance companies surfaced in July. TWG and Guggenheim say there was no wrongdoing. The Lakers and Chelsea sales followed.
The W read
My call: the PWHL isn't next. Walter is selling the things with buyers lined up and big valuations to cash in. A league in its fourth season that just added four teams is not that. It's still a build, and you don't sell a build in the middle of pouring the foundation.
But the league's players, its four new markets and the GMs who left NHL jobs to run them shouldn't have to read the tea leaves. Meghan Duggan left the Devils for Hamilton in May. Hamilton's first season is weeks away. One sentence from TWG saying the PWHL isn't for sale would cost nothing.
Until it comes, every Walter headline will land in the PWHL's inbox too. That's an unfair tax on a league whose product has never been better.
