This week, the New Jersey Nets announced that Jay-Z will open their new, Brooklyn arena with a blowout concert in his old neighborhood. They also announced the team’s name will stay the same when they relocate. And with Brooklyn dreams inching closer to reality, the future looks brighter than ever.
Nets Lessons On Brooklyn, The NBA Lockout, And The Art Of The Deal
But lost in the shadows of all the excitement is a dark truth—to make this arena happen, the Nets ownership seized thousands of residents’ homes. Because they were in the way. And in a scathing essay over at Grantland, Malcolm Gladwell reminds us how this really happened, and explains how it all comes back to the greed and hypocrisy of the NBA Lockout.
The discussion of the financial and legal underpinnings of the Nets stadium deal is fascinating, but as far as the NBA Lockout’s concerned, the operative sentence comes here:
At the very moment the commissioner of the NBA is holding up the New Jersey Nets as a case study of basketball’s impoverishment, the former owner of the team is crowing about 10 percent returns and the new owner is boasting of “explosive” profits.
And this, too: “A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then—as both parties happily count their winnings—what lesson are we asked to draw? The players are greedy.”
So... Yep, pretty devastating conclusion right there. Catch up with the context here.
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