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A whole lot of winning for the Dolan family this week, and the week isn’t even over.
New York Knicks star Jalen Brunson led a third quarter comeback late Wednesday in the Game 1 match-up versus the San Antonio Spurs, with the final score ending at 105-95.
“Jalen Brunson is a monster,” Yahoo Sports NBA senior analyst Kevin O’Connor posted on X.
The monster run in MSG’s stock has continued too.
Shares of Madison Square Garden Sports rose about 1% in early trading in the wake of the win. The stock is up nearly 50% this year, pretty much tracking the Knicks’ ascent as the NBA season progressed.
A dose of more analysis: The timing of the 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 was 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 before bottoming out in October 2002.
Today, the Knicks have entered the NBA finals amid an AI boom, with shares of Micron (MU), SanDisk (SNDK), and Palantir (PLTR) trading at eye-watering valuations.
Meanwhile, the stock prices of AI infrastructure plays such as Cisco (CSCO), Dell (DELL), and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have surged back to life amid strong financial outlooks.
Similar to the dot-com hype, investors are readying for splashy IPOs this year from SpaceX (SPAX.PVT), Anthropic (ANTH.PVT), and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) — three 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 Rangers from the 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 wrote in a recent note.
