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January 20, 2011
No ’Melo, just more drama for Nets
Yahoo! Sports
by Adrian Wojnarowski
Ouch.
Mikhail Prokhorov can unfurl his portrait murals on the sides of Manhattan skyscrapers and marvel over the construction of his new basketball palace in Brooklyn. The Russian billionaire can promise championship parades within five seasons and employ exhaustive research to dispose of the Nets moniker and unwrap something new to call his franchise.
Only, there’s no scrubbing away the residue of decades of dysfunction and disarray with the fresh paint job. There’s no scrubbing it all away with carefully orchestrated news magazine profiles. Prokhorov isn’t the NBA’s most mysterious man, but one more clumsy, clueless creation of the commissioner’s endless failure to resurrect this franchise. All his money and clout and global reach, and yet Prokhorov and his posse look like one more incompetent ownership group killing time and brain cells until the lockout.
It was a stunning, senseless and perfectly fitting performance for Prokhorov on Wednesday night at the Prudential Center: As full-of-it grandstanding ploys go, Prokhorov was brilliant. Once he sensed the Nets couldn’t convince Carmelo Anthony to sign a contract extension, that his trip to the Rockies would be met with one more failure as owner, he made a dramatic declaration the Nets were done recruiting a deal and out of the running for Anthony.
This was no white knight sashaying into the States on a horse, but a basketball dummy on a donkey.
...One by one, they’re all passing over Prokhorov: LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, Amar’e Stoudemire and Chris Bosh. Carlos Boozer and Rudy Gay. A-listers and B-listers, and now ’Melo couldn’t be sold on the owner’s Brooklyn vision. Prokhorov was right to never get on the plane to avoid the public humiliation of ’Melo rejecting the Nets, so he used the bully pulpit on Russian Cultural Night in Newark to play the part of the bad-ass owner jetting in to take control of his franchise.
From the man whose charisma and mystique brought you Travis Outlaw and Johan Petro on the free-agent market, here was the white flag of surrender two months too late.
...’Melo is probably on his way to the New York Knicks, the Russian is headed back to Moscow and the Nets remain a punch line. All these billions of dollars, all these big, shiny ideas and tough talk, and it never, ever changes.
Same old sitcom, same old shameful scene. Same old Nets.
NoLandGrab: Unfortunately for Prokhorov, we're pretty sure his out clause expired when New York State handed the keys to Daniel Goldstein's home to Bruce Ratner.
Posted by eric at January 20, 2011 11:33 AM