Basketball
On January 23, 2004, developer Bruce Ratner announced that he had purchased the National Basketball Association's Nets franchise (then known as the New Jersey Nets) and started on his plan to move the Nets to the 18,000-seat Barclays Center as part of the Atlantic Yards development at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues. After years of delays caused by community opposition and financial difficulties, the arena broke ground in March 2010 and opened in September 2012. The Nets officially changed their names to the Brooklyn Nets on April 30, 2012, and the move was made official. The Nets thus became Brooklyn's first major league sports team in 55 years.
The Brooklyn Kings, a United States Basketball League team, played in Downtown Brooklyn until 2007. The borough also had a franchise in the American Basketball Association in 2006 called the Brooklyn Wonders.
Read more about this topic: Sports In Brooklyn
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)