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Nets Owner Mikhail Prokhorov Calls Knicks Owner James Dolan “That Little Man,” Is My New Favorite Owner

We’ve known for a while now that Russian billionaire and Brooklyn Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov is eccentric.

Eccentric and awesome.

There was the famous 60 Minutes piece, when he showed off his Kalashnikov assault rifle and we found out he once paid a production company to make a high-quality montage of him doing jet-ski stunts. That was fun. There was also a video that emerged of Prokhorov rapping on Russian TV, that time he challenged Mark Cuban to a kickboxing match, and that time he ran for President of Russia. Again: eccentric and awesome is what we’re working with here.

But it’s been awhile since we’ve heard from the towering Nets owner. We were starting to worry: With the team’s hotly contested and highly controversial move to Downtown Brooklyn finally in the books, would The Prok cease his gun-toting and smack-talking ways in favor of a more traditional, tight-lipped approach to pro sports ownership?

Hell no.

From a recently published piece in New York Magazine about the Barclays Center, the brand new arena where the Nets will play their home games.

The one corporate box that’s off-limits? The “Prokhorov Suite,” sitting at the center bowl of the arena, larger than any other private box and reserved for the mercurial Russian owner. (Prokhorov told me back in November that he plans on attending a quarter of the regular-season games and “all the playoff ones.”* He also made sure that I heard him call Dolan “that little man.”)

Fantastic. Just fantastic. For a guy who’s spent an awful lot of time away from the sports franchise he owns, Prokhorov consistently shows a surprising grasp of how to best earn brownie points in New York City’s sometimes complicated media environment: Just dump on James Dolan.

Because no one likes James Dolan.

[New York Magazine]

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