The Blueprint: Jessica Holtz Meets the Moment

CAA’s co-head of basketball talks Karl-Anthony Towns’s winning moment and what comes after winning a championship.

This story appeared in Boardroom’s Fall Issue print magazine and has been adapted for online publication.

The life of a sports agent is not for the faint of heart. The competition to sign elite players starts earlier and earlier as the years pass, and the competition to keep elite players never ends. What used to be a job focused primarily on on-court contract negotiations now requires a wide range of skills, from understanding the value of equity in a brand sponsorship to building long-term IP through media and content creation, product development, team ownership, and a myriad of other avenues. An agent is often the first call a player makes in situations both professional and personal, from working through a contract extension to needing to change a flight.

The bet that a player and an agent make on each other is not a one-time thing: The agent a player signs with for NIL marketing or ahead of a draft is very unlikely to be the agent a player retires with. It’s a fickle business built off a “what have you done for me lately?” mentality, and reality rarely meets expectations. It’s remarkable, in this context, that CAA co-head of basketball Jessica Holtz has multiple clients, including the Phoenix Suns’ Devin Booker and the New York Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns. Following Towns’s incredible sophomore season with the Knicks, culminating in a championship run that galvanized the city, I spoke with Holtz about how an agent and a player meet the moment from a marketing perspective.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Boardroom: Can you describe your role as co-head of basketball and what that means as opposed to just being an agent?

Jessica Holtz: I have been at CAA for 12 years. I don’t remember exactly when I got that title, but I became one of the leaders of the group very quickly into my tenure at CAA. Once Leon Rose left to become president of the New York Knicks [in 2020]. I also became a contract agent. So I have a lane within CAA Basketball where I do both on and off court, and I manage my clients 360. A lot of the other basketball agents work in larger teams — and they have amazing teams. I just have a different setup with my clients because I do both.

Courtesy of Holtz

You’ve been with KAT and Devin Booker since they were drafted. It’s now been over a decade. In that time working with players of that caliber, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the role that an agent plays?

I love that question, because I think that the agency business is evolving. Karl started in the NBA when he was 19. Devin started in the NBA when he was 18. They are different people than they were when they first started, obviously, in many ways. And then I have to evolve as a person. We have to constantly be figuring out what needs we can best fulfill. You have to cover the basics. You have to do their contracts properly. You have to bring in the off-court deals. But at the same time, what are different avenues of business that they’re interested in? What are different streams of revenue that maybe weren’ t there before? What are trends in the sports industry?

I really focus on figuring out what do they need today, what are they going to need next, and how does it fulfill their growth pattern? Because staying with NBA players that long, a lot of players switch agencies a couple times in their career, sometimes three, four times. The reason I think I’ve been able to stay with them so long, and I’ve been lucky to stay with them so long is that constant evolution and constant check-ins and taking a state of the union. Where can we be pivoting? And where do we see the next five years, the next 10 years going? Are we doing things to lay the groundwork now to get us there?

Even before we knew what this Knicks team was going to look like in reality, did you see and feel an immediate difference in marketing conversations when KAT made the move from Minnesota to New York?

First, I’ll say I’m really proud of the work that we did for Karl in Minnesota. He was the No. 1 pick, and he won Rookie of the Year [in the 2015-16 season]. His career took a lot of twists and turns. His mother passed away [in 2020]. Anthony Edwards came to the team [in 2020] as the No. 1 pick. We’ve had a lot of partners through that time. Gatorade has supported Karl for his entire career, dating back to his high school days when he won the Gatorade Athlete of the Year award, and they’ve done an amazing job marketing him. He’s been with Nike his whole career. He’s been with 2K. There was a lot of groundwork laid for who Karl was, the things he was interested in, and the brands he was working with, so that when we got to New York, it wasn’t like, “Oh, goody, here we go! Let’s start marketing!”

It just felt like we got a higher ceiling in New York for Karl, and so many brands are based there. Obviously, there’s a lot of CAA players on the Knicks, and so we kind of see the deal flow amongst us, and it’s really helpful because we know the market value, we know what brands are spending, we know what Knicks partners are interested in. I love being part of a larger team where we can all work together and support each other, because just like the guys support each other as teammates, we support each other as their teammates on the back end.

I think it really just raised the ceiling at that moment, and then you win a championship and the ceiling goes even higher. I don’t know where the ceiling is right now, and it’s been really fun to try to figure it out.

New York is one of the biggest brands in the world just as a place.

Just by existing.

There’s this incredibly fine line that you have to walk when you are in a playoff situation as an agent, as a player, where you’re trying to map all of the possible scenarios and trying to prepare with Karl’s brand partners, with potential opportunities on the horizon. You have to have some level of preparedness for, “Hey, if we go all the way, what happens next?” Can you walk me through a little bit of what that experience was like for you in this scenario and some of those conversations with his partners?

You have to wait until a certain point to have them. If I start in round one saying, “What about if we win a championship? What are you going to do to promote him?” then I sound crazy. So it is a very fine line to walk where you’re kind of like, “Now I feel really comfortable just at least putting out feelers so that we’re prepared.” I would say that the sweep of the Cavs was really helpful for us to be able to prepare because you’re going to the Finals. So there is a chance you’re going to win this. So that’s when you start reaching out and saying, “I want to be prepared, should we win this.”

Once that moment happens, you guys were operating from this incredible place of, OK, we all can all coordinate with each other. I feel like there were definitely way more coordinated TV appearances than you usually see from players. Can you talk me through a little bit of what those next steps were once he reached the championship goal?

“It takes a village” is such an understatement. Mind you, it was the five Knicks players that we were working with and then their significant others. We were doing deals as a unit also for Jordyn Woods and Ali Brunson and Shannon Hart. The girls all did Reese’s. That layer of it required us all coordinating notes, comparing with each other. OG Anunoby and Karl did Fortnite. Josh Hart and Jalen Brunson had their podcast.

It was all hands on deck. Then it was very easy because the guys really do genuinely love each other and they’re all a very likable bunch of people, really good humans. So there was that feeling of, We’re a team, let’s just do as much of this as possible as a team. Once a couple of them were on board, it made it easy for all of us to just get on board. Luckily, a brand would reach out to CAA and it was easy. If this [player) doesn’t want to do it, this one will. These two can do it together. I would say in my probably 20 years of doing this, that was the longest sustained period of quick decision-making I’ve ever had. You couldn’t really hesitate on things for too long. We only had a couple hours to say, “Yes, we’re doing this morning show. No, we’re not doing this morning show. Yes, we’re taking this deal. Can we execute it?”

What was it like getting to celebrate that moment for you personally with Leon Rose, whom you knew so well and had worked so closely with?

On a personal level, I couldn’t be more grateful and thankful. When I first started out at CAA and first started working with Karl and Devin, it was me and Leon in the trenches together. We’ve been through so many situations, so many battles, and he always had my back and has been such an amazing mentor and very much part of the reason why we’re even having this conversation right now. So to be able to look at him and be proud of him and be part of his story was really cool. Something that I think gets lost in the agency business is we are people at the end of the day and we share in our client success, we share in our peer success, and are just genuinely happy for one another.

It’s very hard to put together a championship team. For Leon to have done that in the amount of time that he’s done that is really amazing to watch from afar. When Karl got here two years ago, it’s been so much fun to be part of because I just think the world of him and his family.

As you mentioned, the ceiling gets higher, and the fact is that Karl has just achieved the unachievable. How do you prepare in the offseason for what’s to come next, and how do you talk about what your goals are off the court?

We talk all the time. I have this Notes file in my phone that I made called “The Wish list.” I shouldn’t speak for every basketball player, but I think all my clients are like this-always sharing that if they had a dream deal, this is what it would be. Now it’s figuring out what are some of those conversations that maybe didn’t go our way in the past for whatever reason? What should we revisit? What’s your dream partnership?

He’s building a trading card business. He’s really put his flag in the ground in terms of being a premier athlete in the space. Helping him build that as a huge piece of his brand and capitalizing on this moment is probably the focal point.