NYT Pretends the Nets Are Moving to Brooklyn

photo credit: Todd Heisler/NYT

The Brooklyn Nets don’t actually live or practice in Brooklyn, but YOU GUYS, what if they did?!

The Times uses the build up to Barclays Center’s opening to play fantasy real estate: in what neighborhood would a Brooklyn Net live if a Brooklyn Net lived in Brooklyn? It’s a trend story! It’s a gentrification story! It’s a nursery rhyme!

To answer this very important and completely hypothetical question (the Sports section’s front page features a long story about why the Nets don’t live in the borough), the paper turns to the city’s bright young real estate brokers, to — as Norman Oder puts it over at Atlantic Yards Report — “pitch where tall young men might want to live.” And where might tall young men want to live, besides New Jersey and Manhattan, where most of them already do? The Gray Lady’s suggestions include:

• Apartments B, C, and D on the 9th floor of One Main Street in DUMBO (purchased together and combined), $10 million. Pros: “mesmerizing views,” proximity to downtown Manhattan. Cons: noise from Manhattan Bridge, claustrophobia from “adoring fans.”

• Duplex penthouse at 205 Water Street, $2.9 million. Pros: keyed elevator, on-site garage, 2,300 square feet of terraces and balconies (“trying to find a future practice facility for the Nets in Brooklyn? Problem solved.”) Cons: none listed.

• Penthouse at 163 Washington Ave., a 17-story high-rise, $6,850/month. Pros: “hulks like a basketball player among civilians in its low-slung Clinton Hill neighborhood,” stainless-steel fixtures. Cons: none listed.

• Five-story Brooklyn Heights brownstone at 36 Garden Place, $8.5 million. Pros: bedroom turned into a fitness center, exposed brick (the Nets: they’re just like us!), same neighborhood where Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer once lived. Cons: none listed.

• Seven-bedroom colonial at 2134 Ocean Parkway, $10.75 million. Pros: chandeliers like Versailles, proximity to Brighton Beach. Cons: “less-than-chic enclave of Gravesend.”

• Apartment 9-L at One Hanson Place in Fort Green, $1.15 million. Pros: easy Barclays commute, developed in part by Canyon-Johnson Urban Funds, an investment group that includes Magic Johnson (solidarity), the only one of these any Nets have actually looked at.

But despite being adequately expensive and suitably high-ceilinged (basketball players!), the Times’ fantasy estate-casting leaves Park Slope Net-free.

Transitory athletes may have a tough time penetrating the prewar apartments along Prospect Park West, with their financially rigorous co-op boards.

Gosh darn it, those pesky co-op boards! No pretend Net-neighbors for us, apparently.