New details on Aces investigation: ‘Matt feels we should not engage the commissioner’

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“Hi all,” R&R Partners Chief Marketing Officer Matt Matzen wrote in an email that morning, part of nearly 1,000 pages of correspondence between the LVCVA, R&R Partners and the Las Vegas Aces reviewed by The IX. “Just off the phone with Rob [Dondero, Executive Vice President of R&R and Matzen’s supervisor]. Short story is it was a great conversation, they’re fully supportive, and feel like we can get this done. I’m going to book a meeting for us… can everyone talk at 11:30?”

At least some of these points came from Matt Delsen, the team’s Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, a spokesperson for the Aces confirmed. Delsen is the son of Larry Delsen, the Aces’ Chief Executive Officer. Larry Delsen is described in his Oakland Raiders biography — he’s also on the board of directors of the NFL team owned by Aces owner Mark Davis — as “a trusted advisor to the Davis family for five decades.” Matt Delsen, the Aces CFO/COO, had this guidance for the group, according to Matzen: “Matt feels we should not engage the commissioner for a couple reasons we can discuss on the call. He wasn’t worried about it but wanted us to be aware that other teams will reach out asking how we did it but that’ll be ok”.

Matzen went on to detail the specifics the Aces suggested for the public announcement — the one that both went viral, to the great delight of LVCVA president Steve Hill, the following day while providing further details on the ways the Aces would facilitate that viral moment. As we reported a few weeks ago, that places the Aces at the center of providing value and coordination for what is the very first item of deliverables in the agreement between the LVCVA and those Aces players who have subsequently signed it.

When asked why the COO/CFO of the Aces was coordinating the event and specifics of a deal the Aces have claimed to have no knowledge of, and specifically why Delsen did not think WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert should be told, a spokesperson for the Aces told The IX in an email that the entire conversation was about “the Aces’ franchise partnership with the LVCVA.”

“There is no league approval process for franchise corporate partnership deals that involves the commissioner, therefore there would be no need to specifically engage with the commissioner,” the Aces’ spokesperson said. Obviously, a basic reading of the email describes in significant detail the announcement of and arrangement with the players to be paid by the LVCVA, so if that email is referring to the Aces’ franchise partnership with the LVCVA, it is more problematic legally for Las Vegas than if the team can maintain its plausible deniability around involvement with the deal itself.

When asked the inverse — why, then, specifically, Delsen would make a point of advising the commissioner not be told — a spokesperson for the Aces replied, “We take exception to your characterization that ‘Matt felt it necessary to advise the parties to keep this from the commissioner.’ The LVCVA wanted to finalize its partnership agreement with the team quickly, and there was no need to engage the commissioner.”

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In that same May 16 email, Matzen also mentioned that since the letter of intent for the “team deal” was not yet complete, they’d yet to contact any of the player’s agents.

“We think we can have an LOI for the team deal done by 1:00, at which point we need to immediately begin contacting the agents,” Matzen wrote. This most charitable read of this line is that Matzen is referring to the deal between the Aces and the LVCVA — $250,000 for use of various logos and other items — that LVCVA president Steve Hill told The IX the Aces informed the LVCVA would be a necessary agreement ahead of any deal to the pay the players back on May 3.

Regardless, let’s take a step back from this coordination between the Aces, the LVCVA and R&R Partners to complete a deal to pay Aces players $100,000 apiece to look at how far removed this is from the original stories of both the Aces and the LVCVA. On the day the deal was announced, May 17, Hill told the Las Vegas Review Journal that each player had “signed a contract to ‘reach mutually agreeable opportunities for appearances on Las Vegas’ behalf.'” As we have reported here at The IX since, no player signed an agreement until June 14, and as of late July, a number of the best players on the Aces — A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young and Kelsey Plum — still hadn’t signed this agreement.

A day later, Aces head coach Becky Hammon, whose statements to Dearica Hamby led directly to a suspension by the WNBA last year and are a significant part of Hamby’s lawsuit, filed this week against the Aces, said simply: “I have nothing to do with it. The Aces have nothing to do with it.”

But three days after Hill said the Aces told him how the LVCVA would need to make an arrangement with the Aces for licensing various team logos and other items before paying the players, Aces Chief Revenue Officer Jason Andrea had emailed R&R’s Rob Dondero on May 6, saying: “The team put together a full L.O.I. to help the process go quickly.” An Aces spokesperson said this exchange referred to the precursor deal.

By May 7, the conversation had shifted to the main part of the arrangement, and Matzen had a question for Dondero and Kate Wik, Chief Marketing Officer of the LVCVA: “Didn’t we say we were going to work through that with our contact at the Aces? Is it more important then, that we talk to property partners first so we have a better idea of what we’re thinking the total investment/payout will look like?”

Again, for clarity: this is specifically mentioning an intention “to work through that with our contact at the Aces” ten days before the announcement and nine days before a single agent, by R&R’s own internal communication, was even contacted. Hill previously told The IX that he’d informed Mark Davis of the arrangement to pay the players on May 15. Through the above correspondence on May 16, we know now that no agents had even been contacted by the LVCVA about paying the players at that point.

So who had the LVCVA reached agreement with to pay Aces players $2.4 million over the next two years? A spokesperson for the LVCVA did not respond to an email containing this question.

The May 7 email’s subject line was, simply: “Re: Room4Pay 1 Pager”. Any original email this was likely a response to is not included in the documents provided to The IX by the LVCVA, as required by public records law. Nor is the attachment, “Room4Pay_1Pager_v2.docx” included in the documents disclosed, nor is, actually, any attachment. This would seem to be an important omission from what is a May 9 email from Matzen to Wik and Dondero which includes the following outline of the LVCVA’s plan, redactions theirs:

Hill had previously said to The IX that he’d be willing to provide Kobre & Kim, the law firm hired by the WNBA to conduct this investigation, “anything that is subject to public records requests.” Whether the “Situation” and “Opportunity” portion of this email written by Matzen to “summarize the high-level narrative”, in Matzen’s words, will be redacted from public view and, as important, Kobre & Kim’s view as well may not be a decision the LVCVA can make on its own.

When the LVCVA sent these documents to The IX, the accompanying summary included the line: “Please note that records falling within the deliberative process privilege have been redacted or withheld.” But an attorney contacted by The IX familiar with Nevada public records law laughed at the idea that this redaction would fall under that privilege, nor that somehow while emails are required to be disclosed, the attachments to those emails are somehow exempt.

Moreover, any redaction or withholding must include “a description of the information which is redacted, and the legal citation of the specific statute or other legal authority which is the basis for denying access to the information”, according to the Nevada state government’s public records request manual. This was pointed out to the LVCVA nearly a week ago, with a legal assistant with the organization replying Tuesday: “I forwarded your email to counsel and I’m awaiting further instruction. I will follow up.”

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Ultimately, whether Hill and the Aces are willing to go further of their own accord, or whether Kobre & Kim will move to compel them to turn over further documents, may be beside the point. What is already a matter of public record, between Hill’s public statements and these emails, is a campaign of coordination that four different WNBA team executives said looks like a violation of multiple sections of the collective bargaining agreement’s Circumvention section.

The league has learned this week the dangers of not acting, with Hamby’s attorneys, in her complaint, specifically citing that “the Defendant WNBA provided no meaningful redress to Plaintiff Hamby for the harm she suffered as the victim of violations found by the WNBA”. Among the many tools at Engelbert’s disposal is to void the standard player contract “between any player and any Team when both the player (or any person or entity acting with authority on behalf of such player) and the Team (or Team Affiliate) are found to have committed such violation.” By contrast, during last year’s investigation, the league did not interview any other Aces players, something that the WNBA did not find was Las Vegas’ fault — The IX has reviewed the internal email sent to teams at the conclusion of the Hamby investigation, which stated that the Aces “fully cooperated with the investigation, and this was taken into account” as punishment was decided upon back in May 2023.

That the four Las Vegas players who had yet to sign an agreement with the LVCVA as of late July were Wilson, Gray, Young and Plum could be a saving grace for Las Vegas should the commissioner decide to exercise her full powers in this matter. Though executives around the league were skeptical that much of anything, let alone a full voiding of contracts for any players who signed deals, would come to pass, in such an outcome, Wilson, Gray, Young and Plum would be the only players left on the Las Vegas roster.

It would be both extreme and at odds with how the WNBA has handled such circumstances in the past. But it’s also never been as incumbent upon Engelbert and the league to preserve competitive balance and make it clear, publicly, that the two defendants named in Hamby’s lawsuit — the Aces and the WNBA — aren’t remotely the same.

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