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September 25, 2009
N.B.A.’s Global Outreach Returns to U.S. Shores
The New York Times
by Harvey Araton
In a long and illustrious European coaching career, Ettore Messina has worked for a fair amount of professional basketball owners. None of them, he said, were quite like Mikhail D. Prokhorov, a Russian tycoon who seemed destined to play moneyball in America.
“The guy has a way about him, a vision,” said Messina, who coached for Prokhorov for four years at CSKA Moscow, a top Russian club.
From across the Atlantic and then some, can the Russian billionaire see a prosperous professional basketball future in Brooklyn, before a shovel has gone into the ground for the long-delayed arena and centerpiece of a 22-acre downtown development project known as the Atlantic Yards?
Legal challenges and N.B.A. vetting hurdles remain before 80 percent ownership of the Nets shifts from Bruce C. Ratner to Prokhorov. Then it would take at least two years for them to move from New Jersey and become the Brooklyn Nets. If and when, the Nets will matter in a way they have only dreamed of since they were born in 1967 as the New Jersey Americans of the American Basketball Association, cash-poor and attention-starved.
Posted by eric at September 25, 2009 9:00 AM