Will The Prokhorov Deal Go Down?
September 26th, 2009 | by Ryan Jones |That is the $700 million dollar question.
ESPN’s Chris Sheridan answered the top 10 questions surrounding the sale of the Nets and the most important is if the deal with Mikhail Prokhorov will actually go down or not.
When a deal this big is contingent on getting something built in New York, it’s inherently tenuous. There are tons of wonderful architecture and infrastructure around New York, nearly all of it built decades and decades ago. Just ask the people who have been waiting 50 years for the Second Avenue subway to be built. You’ll find them by the thousands packed like sardines on the Lexington Avenue subway line, the only one serving Manhattan’s densely populated Upper East Side.
Unless your name is Donald Trump or you own a baseball team, it takes forever to get stuff built in New York, and all it takes is one or two temporary restraining orders from one or two judges sympathetic to Ratner’s opponents to grind the process to a halt and possibly keep that first shovel from going into the ground by Dec. 31.
With that in mind, we should call this one a 50-50 proposition. But Ratner has overcome a ton of hurdles already on the Atlantic Yards project, so we’ll tilt the odds in his favor: 60-40 that the big Russian has his hands on the Nets by the time the 2009-10 season ends.
Before the Prokhorov deal, I never thought the move to Brooklyn move would happen. In fact, I figured it was just a matter of time before Ratner sold the Nets to a group that wanted to move the team to another part of the country. But now that Prokhorov is in the mix I would be shocked if the Atlantic Yards project didn’t move forward with the Nets as the most important tenant.
Surely the protests in the courts will continue, but I believe there is enough momentum on the side of Bruce Ratner and the Nets that the first shovel will be in the ground just before Christmas of this year.
