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December 11, 2010
Why did the Nets visit China in October? It wasn't a mistake. They were there to help sell green cards (even though they didn't say so).
Part 8 of a series
Atlantic Yards Report
In a New York Times Magazine cover story October 31, The N.B.A.’s Oligarch and His Power Games, writer Chip Brown misread the Nets' recent trip to China, suggesting it was an unhelpful detour, part of the rocky road facing new owner Mikhail Prokhorov:
The brand-building preseason games in China were arranged when the team had a seven-foot Chinese forward named Yi Jianlian as well as a Mandarin speaker in the marketing department. But with Proky’s arrival, the Nets were suddenly covered with Russian dressing: a new Russian-language Web site, an office in Moscow, a five-year deal with Stolichnaya vodka. Worse, they were bound for China without Yi, who had been packed off to the Washington Wizards in June, or the Mandarin whiz, who’d been globalized out of a job. Ni hao? Nyet!
True, the game was announced in April, when Yi was still a Net. Still, the trip was much more than what the National Basketball Association (NBA) billed as "the homecoming of Houston Rockets All-Star Yao Ming and the debut of the state-of-the-art Guangzhou International Sports Arena."
And it was more that what the Nets, on their Flickr page, called an opportunity "to participate in the NBA China Games 2010, where they played a pair of games against the Rockets and were active alongside NBA Cares."
Nets help sell project
The Nets were there to help Forest City Ratner, via the New York City Regional Center (NYCRC), market green cards to immigrant investors who would invest $500,000 each in the "Brooklyn Arena and Infrastructure Project."
The teams played October 13 in Beijing and October 16 in Guangzhou.
Before each game, the NYCRC held seminars for potential investors, featuring NBA iconography, photos of current Nets players, retired NBA players as guests, and raffles for autographed basketballs and tickets to the upcoming games.
Posted by steve at December 11, 2010 9:53 AM