Pacific Park, Brooklyn
The Barclays Center is the new home arena of the National Basketball Association's Brooklyn Nets, and the NHL's New York Islanders which was purchased by a group led by principal developer Bruce Ratner with the intention of making it and the arena the centerpiece of the whole project. This brought major league professional sports to Brooklyn for the first time since the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, California after the 1957 season. The arena’s design once included an ice skating rink and a green roof. An NBA basketball team now owned primarily by Russia's second richest man Mikhail Prokhorov, the Nets began playing at the Barclays Center arena in 2012. Formerly the New Jersey Nets, the Nets re-branded themselves when they moved to the Barclays Center. Prokhorov is an avid basketball fan, and, with 80 percent ownership in the Nets, he has become the first Russian owner of a major U.S. professional sports franchise. The deal was necessary for Ratner, who was risking losing tax-exempt financing and the Barclays naming-rights deal if he did not break ground within three months' time.
List of Brooklyn Nets seasons
This is a list of seasons completed by the Brooklyn Nets professional basketball team. The Nets were founded as the New Jersey Americans in 1967, a charter franchise of the American Basketball Association (ABA). A year later, the team moved to Long Island, New York, and were renamed as the New York Nets. There, behind the play of Hall of Famer Julius Erving, the team won its only two ABA championships: in 1974 and 1976. After the 1975–76 season, the ABA merged with the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the Nets were one of four franchises that joined the NBA. After a season of being the second team to represent the state of New York (the other being the New York Knicks), the team moved back to New Jersey as the New Jersey Nets.