Is The Brooklyn Nets Move In Trouble?

Four months ago, Goldman Sachs assured all financing would be in place for a $950 million professional basketball arena in Brooklyn by today. Bruce Ratner, owner of the New Jersey Nets and developer of the ambitious, $4 billion Atlantic Yards project, said he was “inches away from completing the deal.” That was before prestigious investment firms started to fall and credit markets went into full-scale panic, triggering a financial crisis on Wall Street unseen since the Great Depression. Atlantic Yards — 16 skyscrapers, an 18,000-seat basketball arena for the Nets, and thousands of apartments at a site at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic avenues — has been delayed by a string of legal challenges and questions about financing. That leaves the Nets playing at the aging Izod Center in the Meadowlands for at least the next three years, which will perpetuate competition with the Prudential Center hockey arena in Newark. The latest delay may complicate the $400 million naming-rights deal with Barclays Bank, which is expected to help offset the cost of the arena, according to published reports. The deal with Barclays was contingent on Ratner’s financing for the project to be in place by the end of November.

Newark Star-Ledger