What Do We Know so Far About Brooklyn Nets' Sale?
The Brooklyn Nets are for sale, and owner Mikhail Prokhorov is about to make a killing.
It's been at least a few months since Prokhorov's group started looking for a buyer, and we haven't heard much come out of the woodwork. Even though he stands to make a boatload of money, it doesn't seem like he's handing the team over to someone else any time soon.
"In terms of Prokhorov, he's told us same as what his spokesperson has said publicly, that there's nothing imminent," NBA commissioner Adam Silver said in mid-January, per ESPN. "He hasn't determined that he's absolutely going to sell, but he's listening to offers, and that's an ongoing process right now."
The Nets sale, though, is hardly a rush.
Prokhorov, who purchased the Nets for $223 million back in 2010, is about to make a massive profit upon the team's sale, and he's happy to wait around for the highest bidder.
"As we have said for many months, ownership is always open to listening to offers -- that's just good business," a Prokhorov representative said in a prepared statement, according to that ESPN story. "There is nothing imminent in terms of a sale of any stake in the team."
Forbes recently released its annual estimates of NBA team values and had the Nets ranked as the sixth most-valuable franchise in the NBA (behind the Los Angeles Lakers, New York Knicks, Chicago Bulls, Boston Celtics and Los Angeles Clippers, respectively).
The list valued Brooklyn at $1.5 billion, as the team brought in $212 million in revenue over the past year. But remember, these franchise values are merely estimates, not definitive appraisals, and teams can go for far more (or less) than whatever the publication says they're worth.
Last year's list valued the Clippers at $575 million. They later went to a basketball-crazed Steve Ballmer for more than $2 billion on the open market. (Granted, such a price was likely an aberration.)
Still, it had the Milwaukee Bucks as the NBA's least valuable franchise at $405 million. Then, Marc Lasry and Wesley Edens purchased them for $550 million.
These prices can only guess worth. They can't necessarily pinpoint how much some starved billionaire will want to pay for his newest toy investment. And now, everyone and their mother wants in on the NBA.
Ever since the league signed a new TV deal before the season—one which would net it $24 billion over nine years starting in 2016, nearly tripling the average annual value of the current television contract—NBA economics have changed.
It's why the salary cap will skyrocket once the new TV money kicks in at the start of the 2016-17 season, and it's why Forbes' estimations pegged teams as 72 percent more valuable in 2015 than they were in 2014.
With all that information, you'd think there would be interest in the Nets, but so far, barely any news has hit the public.
Billionaire Steven Cohen has been the only realistic candidate to make moves in purchasing the team, but he now says he's no longer exploring that option after attending a mid-January meeting with Evercore Partners, the company that is brokering the team's sale.
So, Cohen's out, and who else is there? No one officially, yet.
Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has heard her name come up in rumors, but that doesn't appear to be more than gossip for now.
The Brooklyn Game decided to put out some "Wild Speculation" on who might be the next Nets owner, including the Jerry Seinfeld/Larry David comedy duo, Mark Zuckerberg, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Oprah and Derek Jeter, among unrealistic and unsubstantiated others.
Forget it. Let's just put Yahoo! Sports' NBA sage Adrian Wojnarowski in charge of all Brooklyn basketball operations so he can become his own source in the most reflexive and meta form of dual reporting and business running the world has ever seen.
As Woj knows, the Nets have been trying to slash the budget for some time now, and that starts on the court.
Joe Johnson? On the block.
Brook Lopez? On the block.
Deron Williams? Same thing.
It's simple, really. If you're trying to sell a business, the last thing you want a potential buyer to see is an expensive asset bogging down the company's finances.
Johnson is the highest-paid player on the team. Lopez has a $16.7 million player option for next season and could command major money if he turns it down. Williams, meanwhile, makes as much money as any other NBA point guard, but wouldn't even be an above-average starting 1 if he moved back into the first unit.
The finances for this team are off, and the chances of finding cheap labor that can help immediately are dwindling along with the number of picks of which Brooklyn has control.
It's possible the Nets don't use their own first-round pick until 2019. (2015 is a pick swap with the Atlanta Hawks. 2016 goes to the Boston Celtics unprotected. 2017 is another pick swap, this time with Boston. 2018 once again goes to the Celtics, and, of course, it's unprotected.)
These could be reasons why we haven't heard as many rumors about a Nets sale as anticipated.
When the Bucks went on the market, there was gossip all over the NBA's proverbial hallways. Would Ballmer buy the team and move it to Seattle? Would Lasry and Edens build a new arena?
Same thing with the Hawks, who went on sale earlier in the year, as well. We're already hearing the Hank Aaron rumors and whatnot. The Sacramento Kings were a fun sale with the gossip stemming around if they would move up north to Seattle as well, until Vivek Ranadive (and Kevin Johnson) made sure that wouldn't happen.
But no one's getting in on Prokhorov's team.
So, we wait to find out who will be the next owner of the Brooklyn Nets, but regardless of however much they go for, the Russian billionaire, who paid less than a quarter of a billion dollars for this franchise, is about to get even richer.
Fred Katz averaged almost one point per game in fifth grade but maintains that his per-36-minute numbers were astonishing. Find more of his work on ESPN's TrueHoop Network at ClipperBlog.com. Follow him on Twitter at @FredKatz.
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