Social networks, which have the memory of an elephant for what they want, they just reminded us that seven years have passed since one of the damn covers of the American sports press. At least in its recent history: in October 2013, the NBA season preview made a lot of noise with the team of Playstation who had formed the Nets in Brooklyn, where they had moved in 2012 to resurrect a failing project in New Jersey. It was the great ordeal, and finally a losing battle, of the Russian magnate (and playboy) Mikhail Prokhorov, who presented himself in society after buying the franchise with a “Americans, I come in peace”. His idea was to take New York from the Knicks and from there conquer the East, the NBA and finally the world. To do this, he threw the dice on the mat with a video game quintet: Deron Williams, Joe Johnson, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Brook Lopez. And the magazine Sports Ilustrated He featured them on the cover alongside his coach, legendary (as a player) Jason Kidd, and a headline that ended up looking like a practical joke: Who wants a piece of them? Something like Who dares with them?
The problem was that Kevin Garnett was 37 years old, Paul Pierce 36, Joe Johnson 32 and Deron Williams only 29 but already some incipient physical problems (with the ankles, especially) that accelerated the end of a career that pointed to extraordinary but finally not it was so much. Those 2013-14 Nets won 44 games (44-38), not impressive. And in the playoffs they needed seven games to eliminate the Raptors (4-3) before losing to the Miami Heat in the second round and without regard (4-1). A year later they tiptoed through the first round (fell to the Hawks) and they entered one of the most complex reconstructions in NBA history, one in which obviously neither Kidd nor Billy King, the manager who had to make the team to the taste of Prokhorov and the glittering Brooklyn, were no longer there. With Sean Marks in office and Kenny Atkinson on the bench (he’s gone), the Nets later regained respectability faster than anticipated and what heralded one of the worst transfers in history.
Because on July 12, 2013 the Nets they turned to the Celtics, who were taking apart the glittering project that was champion in 2008 and finalist in 2010 and did their architect, Danny Ainge, a monumental favor: they took the already very veteran Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry with DJ White, a future first round that ended up being Kyle Kuzma (trapped to the Lakers on draft night) and a second that was Sasha Vezenkov, a European who did not has stepped on the NBA. They took away a problem from Ainge (how to deal with the ending of iconic players) and gave him the keys to an ideal rebuild in exchange. Many picks and very high, because the express decomposition of the Nets gave an enormous value to what they gave to the residents of Boston: five players who were not the key to the operation (Keith Bogans, MarShon Brooks, Kris Humphries, Kris Joseph and Gerald Wallace) and the first rounds of 2014 (James Young), 2016 (Jaylen Brown), 2017 (Markelle Fultz’s number 1) and 2018 (Collin Sexton). Thanks to that operation, therefore, the Celtics took Jaylen Brown and negotiated with the Sixers to give the Fultz pick and draft Jayson Tatum with another first round, with which the verdes they chose Romeo Langford in the last draft. That is to say, the era of the jays (Jaylen and Jayson, Brown and Tatum) was a gift from the Nets to the Celtics, who also used the 2018 pick (number 8) in the operation in which they took on Kyrie Irving, a superstar complicated that did not catch on in the Garden and that it is, precisely, in the Brooklyn Nets.
It was, of course, one of the worst transfers in NBA history. And the evils of that ambition without patience of the Nets did not end there: in 2012 they gave 98 million for five years to Deron Williams, who left the team in 2015 and the NBA in 2017 … but was collecting from the Nets (based on five million annual prorations) until last June. And what is worse, in the same 2012 and to get Gerald Wallace, they sent a first round to the Portland Trail Blazers. His first of 2012 that ended up allowing the Oregonians to select Damian Lillard with pick 6, one of the best NBA players in recent years. All these movements, this obsession with burning ships and making noise, is impossible to understand without the complex figure of a Prokhorov who quickly got tired after his NBA toy gave him so much trouble.
The Global Russian Revolution
“Basketball gods smile at the Nets today”. The phrase was pronounced by Prokhorov, who was then 48 years old and a Russian businessman of Jewish origin and possessor of a fortune that exceeded 13,500 million euros. In the world there were only 57 people richer than him, six in that new Russia of his marked by the sign of the hypercapitalism. Playboy, aspiring politician who had obtained 8% of the votes in his country’s last presidential race and godfather of version 2.0 of the old Slavic proverb: “In Russia there are no roads, only directions ”. Prokhorov’s direction, from metallurgy to nanotechnology and from heavy industry to art galleries, has always been the achievement of everything he sets out to do. And that initial appointment corresponds to the presentation as Nets players of Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry. Moments later he made it clear that this happy day was not a goal for his glittering franchise but a beginning: “Am I proud? I will only be when we win the ring “. It was not a toast to the sun, even if it seems so now. It was a one-way route that made perfect sense in his mind. And in his wallet: “I am not a man of methods. I am a man of results”.
By then the rest of NBA owners already looked askance at the first among their own born outside the United States. For his histrionic touch and his methods, almost of scorched earth. For his air of godfather of the new global russians, those that mix the idiosyncrasy and accent of their mother country with western customs, cosmopolitan and refined to the point of snobbishness. A new community that has broken topics in the Big Apple and that has distanced itself from the Russian ghetto of Brighton Beach. A new stereotype of New York high society that “cook like the French and have fun like the Americans but still establish friendship circles like the Russians”.
Prokhorov officially became the owner of the New Jersey Nets, an impoverished and adrift franchise, on May 11, 2010. He landed with his undeniable charm, that introductory phrase to remember (“Americans, I come in peace”) And a strategic photograph with Jay-Z and Michael Bloomberg, the showman and the mayor. The perfect baptism for a guy who promised a ring in five rings. For it, that failed team of 2013 took 101 million in salaries, a total expense of 182 for the luxury tax. Change for the new boss. One whose plan was to first devour the historic Knicks as the alpha male of New York City and then storm the throne from the luxurious new Barclays Center whose video scoreboard, a masterpiece of Daktronics, cost ten million dollars. Prokohorov, with the blessing of his right hand Irina Pavlova, did not think in terms of spending but of opportunity and investment. And at first everything was going well: those Nets in which the grass left by Bruce Ratner did not grow cost the Russian tycoon 220 million dollars were worth just three years later almost 800 million.
The economic benefit cannot be questioned: in 2017, Prokhorov began to hand over the Nets to Joseph Tai, co-founder of Alibaba, who first paid 1.2 billion for 49% of the franchise and later, in September 2019, another 3,500 (record in American sport) for the rest of the team, the pavilion (Barclays Center) and a debt of more than 300 million that it took over and that was included in the price. Prokhorov left talking about “pride and honor”And the satisfaction of having moved the team to Brooklyn, the capital of the world, and of having left it in a much better situation than it inherited. So it was, actually, but he left with just one playoff series won and a record of 288 wins by 434 losses. A scratch on the pride of a guy used to winning and who in the NBA always seemed like a strange, alien body. It will be because of what Winston Churchill said of Mother Russia, whom he called “a riddle wrapped in a mystery within an enigma”.
