« Burning questions | Main | Coney Island the place for an arena? Marty used to think so »
June 12, 2006
Nets make a play to give N.J. fan base a bounce
Team's CEO, a Morristown native, enlists familiar faces to cultivate interest at county airport
Morris County Daily Record
By Abbott Koloff
NJ Nets CEO Brett Yormark brings the tupperware party to the NBA:
[Yormark] made his sales pitch about 40 minutes into a party where potential customers snacked on hors d'oeuvres and schmoozed with team officials and a former player.
Though Yormark goes to extraordinary efforts to re-sign season ticket holders, the Nets still have a long way to go to operating in the black:
Federal financial filings by Forest City Enterprises, the Nets' parent company, indicate that the team had $24 million in operating losses last year. Nets officials do not comment on the team's finances.
Marc Ganis, a sports marketing consultant from Chicago, said a lot of NBA teams have operating losses because the most recent collective bargaining agreement created players' salaries that are too high to sustain. But Ganis also said the Nets appear to have one of the NBA's largest operating losses.
...
Ganis said that while the Nets and other franchises will continue to lose money, he expects Yormark to increase the team's gross revenues, estimating that it should be approaching $100 million. Fortune Magazine recently ranked the Nets 22nd among NBA franchises for the 2004-05 season, with an estimated $87 million in gross revenues. That's about half the estimated revenues generated by the New York Knicks, the Nets' competition in the New York area.
Posted by lumi at June 12, 2006 7:40 AM