SPORTS> North America
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SPORTS> North America
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A Russian owner in NBA: Tycoon buying NJ Nets
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-24 14:25 In going global, Stern could be welcoming quite a globetrotter. Prokhorov, who is 6-foot-6 (200 centimeters) and was an avid basketball player in his school days, is a fixture in glitzy European resorts and once was held in France for four days of questioning - but never charged - in a prostitution investigation. Even in Russia, he raises eyebrows for his penchant for private jets and a gorgeous entourage. A 2007 TV commercial for a Russian juice company lampooned him, although it did not name him. Prokhorov's love of the high life is rivaled by his devotion to basketball. He owns a share of the Russian team CSKA Moscow, and he said on his blog he wants to buy the Nets partly to get access to NBA training methods and help Russian coaches get internships in the league. Russia has a proud basketball tradition, having won the Euro championship in 2007, and CSKA is a perennial Euroleague power. Yet Andrei Kirilenko, a Utah Jazz forward, is the only Russian currently in the NBA. It remains to be seen how Prokhorov's jet-setting lifestyle might play with Nets fans, but the NBA will be far more interested in his finances. Prokhorov has been ranked as his country's richest man in the Russian edition of Forbes, with an estimated $9.5 billion - even after shrinking by some $7 billion in the world economic crisis. He weathered the financial storm by cashing out some lucrative assets before the downturn battered commodity markets. Another rich Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, is the owner of the British soccer power Chelsea. Uzbekistan-born billionaire Alisher Usmanov owns more than 25 percent of another British soccer team, Arsenal. "In any sport nowadays, if you can bring someone in who is financially stable, it is great for the sport, and I think it will be great for the NBA," former player and current TV analyst Charles Barkley said. "If he's going to do some work on the building and not take advantage of the fans, that's great for the city." The franchise started with the ABA in 1967 as the Americans and then the Nets, bouncing around to different arenas in New Jersey and New York before settling in East Rutherford in 1981-82. It's not clear how Brooklyn's sports fans, who have nursed their wounded pride ever since the Dodgers left, might take to a team with foreign ownership. There's already been community grumbling over the British bank Barclays buying the naming rights to the arena - and also the rights to name the subway station beneath it. Brooklyn's famed Russian enclave of Brighton Beach is only a few miles (kilometers) from the proposed arena, but for many Russian emigrants Prokhorov symbolizes everything wrong in their homeland - a smooth operator who made a fortune when Russia sold off its state industrial treasures for a song. Nets president Rod Thorn said he expects little reaction about a Russian owner: "I don't think players really care who owns the team." Los Angeles Lakers guard Derek Fisher, who also is president of |
