Nets partnership announcements, suites showroom are four months late

Shortly before luxury suites go on sale Thursday, Nets Sports & Entertainment President Brett Yormark (right) has some good news, according to Sports Business Journal:
the team has signed six new founding partners that join previously announced Jones Soda, representing more than $100 million in sponsorship commitments in the new building.

Along with the previously-announced Jones Soda, the others are current Nets sponsors: Anheuser-Busch, Cushman & Wakefield, MGM Grand/Foxwoods, ADT, Emblem Health and Izod, which has naming rights at the Nets’ current arena at the Meadowlands.

Scheduled for January

Last October, Yormark told investors that this was all coming in January. He said the team aims for “14 totally integrated partners, Barclays of which will be the lead.” He added, “And I think in January, we'll be able to announce half of those partnerships that we've been able to come to an agreement on.”

He said the Barclays Center Showroom in the Times Tower should open “some time in January.”

Groundbreaking this year?

Given Yormark's fuzziness on the timetable, we should take with a grain of salt his prediction in Sports Business Journal that the arena groundbreaking would come in the fourth quarter of this year and the arena would open in time for the 2010-11 season.

After all, last September on WFAN he was predicting groundbreaking in a month or two: "We've just ordered steel and we're expecting, hopefully, to break ground, in October-November. It usually takes about 24 months to build an arena that's 850,000 square feet, so we think we're going to be right there for the 09-10 season, and very excited about it."

"Construction activation platform"

Meanwhile, we apparently get a new term to add to the Atlantic Yards Lexicon: "construction activation platform."

The newspaper reports:
Incremental to the founding partnership fees, many of the new sponsors will support what the Nets are calling a “construction activation platform” with signage, countdown clocks and other media in which partners will be identified.

“We’ll be marketing the heck out of the building even before it is being built,” Yormark said.

Indeed, that's the subject of the article.