When the Nets fired Avery Johnson this past Thursday after he compiled a .500 record with a new and newly talented roster, many people noted that Johnson had suffered a particularly dramatic reversal of fortune: After going 11-4 in November, Johnson won Eastern Conference Coach of the Month; after the Nets went 3-10 in …

Someone out there—a company named Cyber Mesa, we think—is under the impression that touting Jay-Z will get on Mikhail Prokhorov's nerves enough to make him a buy a (presumably very expensive) domain name.

A while back, we looked into who owns Nets.com, and why that web address doesn't redirect to the NBA website's subpage for the Brooklyn Nets. Type in the name for any other team in the league, and you'll be redirected to NBA.com/TEAM. If you typed in Nets.com a few months ago, you were redirected to the webpage of…

The guy who owns the Nets and isn't Jay-Z sat down for a lengthy Q&A with the Post. He is every bit the caricature the internet has made him out to be. A sample:

Somehow, the New Jersey/Brooklyn Nets never owned the Nets.com web domain. (It's surprising, in this era, but it happens.) Until recently, if you tried to go to nets.com, you were redirected to CyberMesa.com, the website for "a telecommunications company with headquarters in Santa Fe, New Mexico." For information on the…

It was a long cold Sunday for New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, who decided a few months ago to challenge Vladimir Putin in the 2012 Russian presidential election. Nyet, Prokhorov! Nyet! As we've noted before, Putin is not only strong leader who crush enemy like Black Sea mosquito but also manliest sportsman of…

via The New Yorker(!)

The New York Times today strains really, really hard to portray New Jersey Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov as a serious candidate for the Russian presidency. Never mind that Prokhorov is polling around 5 percent, or that democracy in Russia is about as real as Vladimir Putin's collection of scuba diving videos. Putin, by …

Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov, the Russian, is presumably well trained in stagecraft and message-coordination. He's a political actor back home on the steppe. He also happens to have designs on acquiring Dwight Howard, the tired superstar, from the Magic.

Mikhail Prokhorov promised to be a hands-on owner of the Nets, but that was before he committed to running a country of 142 million people. Prokhorov today announced he intends to run for President in next year's elections, challenging former President and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. No word on what this…