Mikhail Prokhorov is about making money. Do not ever forget that.
He’s also good at it. He has a plan. Prokhorov spoke with Forbes Russia and laid out his plans (which the New York Daily News translated):
“When you’re talking about the business of sports, you can’t leave out passion and love. That’s why, in this business in particular, I need to be maximally careful, so that my passion and love for basketball don’t interfere with my business reasoning. It has to do with balancing my own internal interests and here I will be very self-discipline.”
“I hope that this asset, which I bought for $200 million, will be worth at least $1 billion in five years. We got in at the right time.”
It’s always about the money. And that doesn’t sound like a guy who is going to spend like mad, by the way.
His plan is all about Brooklyn.
“Brooklyn is a country unto itself. Even the Americans themselves say that. It’s the center of immigration. It has a unique energy to it. Tens of millions of people who now live in the US came through Brooklyn.
“When I’ve traveled around to different cities, people have come up to me and said, ‘We’re Brooklynites. Give us a great Nets team and we’ll root for them.’”
“The structure of the deal is such that, before the move to Brooklyn, we plan to have a certain budget deficit. That’s built in. But from the time we move to Brooklyn, the team becomes profitable.”
Brooklyn is a country unto itself. In two years, I will be using that phrase constantly. Trust me.