The N.B.A.’s Oligarch and His Power Games.docVIP

The N.B.A.’s Oligarch and His Power Games By CHIP BROWN The Prokhorov Effect“Pretend you are putting a gun against my back,” said the Russian billionaire. We were standing in a small training room on the third floor of his house outside Moscow. Suddenly he pivoted, and any ideas I had of sprinting off with his wallet went poof. His loaded foot was poised to crush my knee. You had to wonder, Did he really need the full security detail that followed his chauffeured Mercedes around Moscow in a Land Rover? The key was that your body had to be relaxed, he said. Not rigid. Not tense. “You have to be soft.” “You could have broken my leg.” “Yes,” he said, “but in a very soft manner.” YOU MIGHT THINK that Mikhail Prokhorov would have had a not-so-soft case of buyer’s remorse this past spring. Last year, a month before the start of the National Basketball Association season, the 45-year-old Russian billionaire struck a deal to buy the New Jersey Nets from the real estate developer Bruce C. Ratner, who had owned the team since 2004. The price was $200 million for 80 percent of the franchise and 45 percent of the long-delayed Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn, where the Nets will play beginning in 2012. Prokhorov also agreed to cover some $60 million in operational costs and 80 percent of $207 million in debt. When the league owners finally ratified the sale eight months later, in May of this year, the Nets record stood at 12 wins and 70 losses, and Prokhorov’s shiny new team was the laughingstock of the N.B.A. It was hard to count the low points. Coach Lawrence Frank was fired during the 0-for-18 start. At a snowy night game against the Milwaukee Bucks in February, when the Nets’ record stood at 4 and 47, there were nearly 19,000 empty seats in the Izod Center. By midseason, TV ratings had plunged 45 percent and were the lowest in the league. The franchise that once played to big crowds and made back-to-back trips to the N.B.A. finals in 2002 and 2003 had traded away its star