NJ Nets president: Brooklyn is ready for the Nets

New Jersey Nets president Brett Yormark, who is visiting Moscow on business, spoke to Sport-Express about the club’s move to the Barclays Center arena in Brooklyn.

«We can’t wait to move to Barclays Center. The arena will open very soon – on Septermber 28. At the end of spring we will reveal the official logo and start the merchandise sales for Brooklyn Nets. So a lot of exciting things will be happening to the club in the next few months,» said the president of the club owned by the Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.

«Brooklyn, with a population of over 2.5 million, is a great market for us, because it has no local sports team. We’ve been laying the groundwork for this move over the last seven years: held various social events, asked the players to take part. So we can say for certain now: Brooklyn is ready to host the Nets.»

«Brooklyn has the largest Russian-speaking community in the USA, around 100 thousand people. It would be a great challenge for us to attract their attention to the Barclays Center, not just for basketball, but for other events, too. For example, we know that the Russians love hockey, and just this morning I met the head of the KHL. Who knows – perhaps in the future we will be able to offer this sport at the arena alongside basketball – technically, it wouldn’t be a problem. We already announced that our arena will host a preseason game between NY Islanders and New Jersey Devils, who both have Russians in their line-ups – Evgeny Nabokov and Ilya Kovalchuk. One of our targets is to attract the Russian diaspora by hosting the events that would interest them,» Yormark concluded.