For two years, Barclays Center has been the epicenter of major Brooklyn entertainment, both with around-the-year events and Brooklyn’s lone professional sports team, the Brooklyn Nets.
But soon, the Nets won’t be the only game in town. At the beginning of the 2015-2016 NHL season, the New York Islanders will leave Long Island behind to play hockey at Barclays Center.
The Islanders leave the decaying Nassau Coliseum behind (as former Nets owner and Forest City Ratner chair Bruce Ratner funds its redevelopment) to join the Nets in Brooklyn, though they’ll still play a half-dozen games there per season. They also didn’t come cheap, as Forbes reported Friday:
Price tag: $485 million, according to multiple sources familiar with the transaction but who are not authorized to speak about it publicly. That is a rich valuation when you consider that a year ago Vincent Viola acquired another troubled NHL team, the Florida Panthers, for an enterprise value (equity plus net debt) of just $160 million (Note: the reported sale prices of the Panthers at the time of the deal–from $230 million to $250 million–were not enterprise values because those numbers included commitments to fund future operating losses).
$485 million is no small chunk of change, but compared to the NBA’s recent valuations it’s a pittance: the Los Angeles Clippers recently sold for a record $2 billion, and a new nine-year T.V. deal worth close to $25 billion may mean that no team goes for less than $1 billion ever again.
Now if only they could get that scoreboard fixed.
Forbes — Charles Wang Actually Got $485 Million For The New York Islanders
