Ice Cube’s BIG3 basketball league just made its biggest move yet. On June 12, the 3-on-3 league announced a deal to merge with Graf Global Corp., a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), in a transaction that values BIG3 at $290 million. Once the deal closes, the company will be renamed Big3 Basketball Holdings, Inc. and is expected to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange, NYSE American, or Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “TONT.”
If everything goes as planned, BIG3 will become the first professional sports league in U.S. history to trade on a public stock exchange, meaning regular fans, not just private investors and billionaires, can own a piece of the league.
So what does “going public” actually mean here? Normally a company goes public through an IPO, a slow and expensive process. BIG3 is taking a shortcut by merging with a SPAC, essentially a shell company that’s already publicly traded and sitting on cash. Graf Global’s trust account held roughly $249 million as of June 10, 2026. Once the merger closes, that cash combines with BIG3’s existing ownership to form the new public company. BIG3’s current owners roll their equity into the new entity, but their shares can now be bought and sold on the open market.
For Ice Cube and co-founder Jeff Kwatinetz, the move is about turning fans into stakeholders. As Cube put it: “You can’t participate in the upside of the team besides winning. And we need the fans for the league to be successful, so it’s a match made in heaven.”
Kwatinetz kept it short: “Everything is coming together this year.”
James Graf, CEO of Graf Global, framed it as a rare investing opportunity: “We are excited to partner with Cube, Jeff, and their team to bring BIG3 to the public markets. There are few, if any, opportunities for public markets investors to own equity directly in professional sports leagues or teams. We believe such investments may deliver uncorrelated returns over time, especially seeing the appreciation of team values and the growth of sports advertising across media.”
For the brand, this is a major shift. Public company status gives BIG3 access to capital it never had as a private league, money it can put toward adding teams, expanding internationally, and growing media and sponsorship deals. Existing BIG3 shareholders are expected to convert 100% of their equity into shares of the combined public company, with the potential to earn additional shares if the new stock performs well after listing.
It’s also a continuation of a strategy BIG3 has used before. A couple of years back, the league sold its first team in a $10 million deal to investment firm DCB Sports, planting a permanent franchise in Los Angeles instead of running as a touring all-star exhibition. Cube said the goal was “growing the sport and the league,” and going public is essentially that same playbook applied to the whole company.
Timing matters too. The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026, pending shareholder approvals and other customary conditions, and it lands right as BIG3 opens its ninth season on June 20 in Los Angeles, with matchups including Detroit Amps vs. DMV Trilogy, LA Riot vs. Miami 305, Houston Rig Hands vs. Chicago Triplets, and Dallas Power vs. Boston Ball Hogs.
Leadership stays the same after the merger, with Ice Cube as CEO, Kwatinetz as chairman, Sean Bannon as president, and Clyde Drexler as commissioner, so the people who built BIG3 are still running it, just now with a much bigger balance sheet and a ticker symbol attached to their names.
Whether TONT becomes a hit on the exchange is still unknown, but the bet is clear: BIG3’s next phase of growth isn’t coming from a new star signing, it’s coming from Wall Street.
