Purchasing a basketball team is very expensive, specially an NBA basketball team.
It will cost you millions and millions of money. But the expenses do not end once you’ve bought the team, it continues. So, it is not impossible for a team to have a new owner once in a while. Other owners just simply give up on the team, while others don’t have enough money to maintain the needs of the team.
If you are a New Jersey Nets fan or plainly a basketball fan and you want to know who the New Jersey Nets owner is, then you are on the right track.
A little recap
Before playing in the NBA, the New Jersey Nets played in the ABA or the American Basketball Association. The New Jersey Nets Owner then was Arthur Brown, and the team’s name wasn’t New Jersey Nets yet, they were the New York Americans then. In season 1968-1969, the team had a terrible record, and right after the season ended, so did the New York American ownership of Arthur Brown.
The NBA
Arthur Brown sold the New York Americans to a clothing manufacturer named Roy Boe. In 1976, when the American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association finally decided to merge, the New York Americans joined the NBA together with some other ABA teams—the Nuggets, Pacers and the San Antonio Spurs. The team paid the NBA $3.2 million just to join NBA.
The New York Americans were surprised when the NBA forced them to pay an additional of $4.2 million directly to the Knicks because they were said to be invading the New York Knicks’ area. The New Jersey Nets owner got low in cash and was forced to sell Julius Erving to the Philadelphia 76ers for $3 million.
The New Jersey Nets
In 1977, just before the 1977-1978 season started, Boe decided to move the franchise back to New Jersey and renamed the team, hence the New Jersey Nets. Just after the said season, Boe sold the team to a group of seven local businessmen, who later became known as the “Secaucus Seven”, which was led by Joe Taub and Alan N. Cohen. Under the Secaucus ownership, the team did great.
However, after two decades of being with the team, the group decided to end their ownership and sold it to a local real estate developer, the YankeeNets.
After failing to secure a deal for a new arena in Newark, New Jersey, the YankeeNets ended their ownership of the nets in 2004. Bruce Ratner together with other real estate developers became the New Jersey Nets owner.
Ever since the start of Ratner’s ownership, he planned to build an arena in Brooklyn, where the rapper Jay-Z, who is also a minor owner of the team, is a native. Due to lack of funds, the Arena wasn’t built. In 2009, Russia’s 2nd richest man, according to Forbes, wants to be the major owner of the team, but Ratner is still a minor owner of the team.
The New Jersey Nets owner is Mikhail Prokhorov. He proposed that he would fund a loan for the construction of a $700 million arena in Brooklyn. They were successful and the Barclays Arena in Brooklyn is still under construction and will be used in the season 2012.