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.