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September 27, 2011
How the New Jersey Nets are like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”
Billy Paultz Reconsidered
by Mike Gross
Terrific piece here from Malcolm Gladwell on the NBA lockout, and especially the colorful recent business history of the New Jersey Nets.
Gladwell’s overarching point here, and in a previous piece on Grantland, is one I’ve made many times. Pro sports teams are not businesses. They are luxury goods like works of art, yachts, Ferraris or Italian Villas.
...Consider the Nets’ situation, in which the previous owner, Bruce Ratner, wanted the team as part of a mega-real estate arena project in Brooklyn. A competing offer to buy the property from the city, from a developer named Gary Barnett, would have used less land, been far less intrusive to the existing neighborhood, and would have resulted in just apartment buildings. No arena. No Nets.
Oh: And Barnett’s offer was triple Ratner’s.
Gladwell: “Barnett lost. He never had a chance. He wanted to build apartments. Ratner was restoring the sporting glory lost when the Dodgers fled for Los Angeles.”
Related coverage...
Nets Are Scorching, Gladwell on the Nets and NBA Economics
That said, you don’t need financial expertise to detect BS from billionaires, and Ratner laid it on thick today about youth — citing the prospect of a child seeing their first circus at the Barclays Center as his driving inspiration. Come on, Bruce. If this didn’t give you the opportunity to make boatloads of money, you wouldn’t do it. I’m sure that Barclays will do a lot for kids, but it’s not about them.
The sad truth, though, is that Ratner can always pretend otherwise. We can paint him as a greedy, dirty billionaire as much as we want (fair or not), and he’ll remain a billionaire. That’s the game. I’d just rather watch a different one.
NoLandGrab: It's small consolation, but Bruce Ratner, while rich, is by all reports worth considerably less than a billion dollars.
Posted by eric at September 27, 2011 12:57 PM