Back in high school, one of my favorite clothing staples was a Knicks jersey adorned with Latrell Sprewell’s number eight. I wistfully remembered this as I pulled a black jersey bearing the same digit from the rack in a Midtown Modell’s last month. This time, the number on my back would represent a player on a different team, Deron Williams, the star point guard of the nascent Brooklyn Nets. Read More
Basketball is back. Three weeks after opening night was canceled in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, four months after the Knicks let Jeremy Lin slip out of town, 13 years since the Knicks’ fluke run to the NBA finals, and two decades since Pat Riley’s tough-guy team captivated New York in the early years of the Giuliani era, fans in the world’s greatest basketball city care without cynicism again.
The Isiah Thomas era and the Knicks’ failed pursuit of LeBron James are old news. The Nets’ long struggle for big-city relevance got lost somewhere in New York harbor. When the teams squared off Monday night in Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center, the city had plenty to cheer about: real stars, the top two spots in the Atlantic Division standings and the eyes of millions upon us. Read More
Sportswriter Jake Appleman has inked a deal with Scribner to cover the Brooklyn Nets debut season. Mr. Appleman has written about basketball for The New York Times, NBA.com, Vibe and NBC Sport and is a senior writer at SLAM magazine. Mr. Appleman tweeted the news this afternoon.
Other sportswriters throughout Brooklyn are surely kicking themselves Read More
Last Wednesday afternoon, James Dolan rose from his stool on a makeshift stage in the bowels of Madison Square Garden and shuffled to the podium to introduce Carmelo Anthony, the unstoppable small forward for whom the Knicks had just dealt half of their starting lineup to anoint as the team’s latest savior.
“While we have Read More
Textingly has scored the NJ Nets as its first big customer. The NY based startup launched as part of TechCrunch Disrupt last May. Erick Schonfeld reports the deal raised $400,000, more than half of the $750,000 goal in Textingly’s seed round.
The Nets will be using Textingly to manage trivia games and ticket Read More
The latest quarterly filing from Forest City Enterprises–parent company of Atlantic Yards developer Forest City Ratner–is in, and there’s a few points worth noting:
-The company’s efforts to start construction on the Nets arena faces another previously unreported hurdle: Forest City stopped sending in required payments on a $162 million loan–the mortgage on its Read More
On Sept. 9, Bruce Ratner, the powerful developer scrambling to start building a new Brooklyn basketball arena for the Nets, gave a prediction: The credit ratings agencies would deliver ratings on about $700 million in bonds for the arena by the end of the month. The ratings are a necessary precursor of financing the Read More
