Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report

Forbes' new list of  America's Most Powerful Women in Sports includes two New York Liberty connections, another sign of the team's ascension. Its strategy was to discern categories—owners/investors, business executives, front office leaders, athletes and amplifiers—and then put them in a formula that assessed media mentions, revenue, and more, aiming to list five people per category and no more than two people from the same league in any category.  First among Amplifiers were: #9. Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart Cofounders, Unrivaled; Forward, Minnesota Lynx (Collier); Forward, New York Liberty (Stewart) On the court, Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart are among the best in the game: Collier was the runner-up in voting for the WNBA’s 2025 Most Valuable Player Award, and Stewart won the award in 2018 and 2023. Through Unrivaled, they’re changing the game altogether. Founded by the former UConn teammates in 2023, Unrivaled is a 3-on-3 league offering WNBA players an o...

CULTURED , "a leading voice for inspiration and a trusted vehicle for discovery at the intersection of art, design, and style," offers a July 15 interview with "philanthropist and businesswoman" Clara Wu Tsai, bannered as "New York Liberty Owner." (h/t NetsDaily ) It offers both insight and myopia toward the tricky melding of sports venues and art. In  New York Liberty Owner Clara Wu Tsai on What the Art World Can Learn From Women’s Basketball , Sophia Cohen, daughter of New York Mets owner Steve Cohen, leads off with a fat pitch to herself--and then Tsai, who with her husband Joe Tsai owns most of BSE Global, parent of the arena company, Brooklyn Nets, and New York Liberty: I’ve spent my fair share of time in sports stadiums and arenas.  Like museums, they are special places where a wide variety of people come together with a common goal to witness excellence.    The businesswoman and philanthropist Clara Wu Tsai—who owns the Brooklyn Nets, Barclays Cente...

A recent brief interview on the Bloomberg Businesweek Daily  podcast  featured BSE Global's CEO Sam Zussman. The summary: BSE Global, the parent company of the NBA's Brooklyn Nets, the WNBA's New York Liberty, as well as their home arena, Barclays Center, has built a business model across sports, entertainment, hospitality and media. The company believes that its array of multiple businesses enables it to enjoy operational leverage and extract cross-functional synergies. Sam Zussman, CEO of BSE Global, explains how Brooklyn's unique culture and history make it the ideal home base for the "experiential" powerhouse. Sam speaks with Tim Stenovec, Emily Graffeo and Randall Williams on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily. They didn't explain cross-functional synergies, but perhaps we'll see that as, for example, the Planet Brooklyn festival emerges next month. Event total Zussman described the arena as "open roughly 190 nights a year." Is that accurate?...

City & State NY on June 30 announced the  2025 Brooklyn Power 100 , and missed something important about the owners of BSE Global, as I explain below. 43. Joseph Tsai & Clara Wu Tsai Co-Owners, Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty: A Brooklyn basketball power couple, the Tsais got game. Joseph Tsai, the billionaire co-founder of Alibaba Group, chairs BSE Global and owns the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty. He recently sold a minority stake at a $6 billion valuation while backing a franchise rebuild he calls a “labor of love.” He’s also a founding board member of The Asian American Foundation. Clara Wu Tsai, governor of the New York Liberty and BSE Global vice chair, brought the Liberty back to Brooklyn, recruited Breanna Stewart and helped lead the team to its first WNBA title. As founder of the Social Justice Fund, she’s also directing a $50 million, decadelong investment in racial equity and economic mobility across Brooklyn, including capital access for Black-owned busi...

Three sports team owners, including Clara Wu Tsai of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty, spoke at the Forbes Iconoclast Summit June 5 in Manhattan, with Wu Tsai suggesting that the WNBA offers a "huge investment opportunity" and Marc Lasry, former co-owner of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, saying "it's never a good time to sell" a sports team, given steadily rising valuations. (See coverage in Forbes and NetsDaily .) Nobody, of course, mentioned that the leagues are monopolies, that team ownership offers great tax breaks, and that team owners leverage subsidies, tax breaks, and other benefits from their host cities and states. To Forbes' Randall Lane, Wu Tsai confirmed that, yes, the Liberty just got a minority investment that valued the team at $450 million. (Previously, it was just "reportedly." ) He congratulated her on the path to the professed $1 billion valuation: "So that number is good." "Number's great," said Wu T...

The defending WNBA champion New York Liberty have started the new season 8-0 ( link ) and the team and their mascot, Ellie the Elephant, are getting a lot more buzz. The Brooklyn Public Library, following up its successful promotion of Jay-Z library cards as part of a giant star-produced exhibit , now offers the  New York Liberty Library Card , "a special-edition library card celebrating the New York Liberty, our hometown team and the 2024 WNBA champions!" Via Brooklyn Public Library There will be 100,000 cards, available at all library locations. Also, the Liberty and the library are partnering through Brooklyn Basketball to support BPL's Summer at the Library programming. The Brooklyn Paper lapped up the promotion: Ellie created a special summer reading list of books about basketball, empowerment, community, friendship, and women in sports — with selections from picture book “You Hold Me Up” to young adult graphic novel “Wash Day Diaries” and the new nonfiction book...

It's a crushing irony, if you see the big picture. While some believed that Atlantic Yards (later Pacific Park) should be seen as a whole, with the possibility of cross-subsidization of its more successful elements, that hasn't happened, even though it could, as I explain below. So affordable housing has been delayed, becoming ever more costly, while the value of the Brooklyn Nets, New York Liberty, the Barclays Center operating company, and the overall BSE Global growing dramatically.  The boost That was shown last year when BSE Global owners, Joe and Clara Wu Tsai, sold 15% of the company to the Julia Koch family, their fortune based on the late (right-wing funder) David Koch's Koch Industries, at a valuation of $6 billion. That transaction valued the New York Liberty, which the Tsais acquired for a song and invested in savvily, at $250 million, as the overall WNBA grows with greater public interest and more lucrative sponsorship/TV deals. The bigger boost Yesterday The A...

So Adweek Feb. 24 published  The New York Liberty's journey from chaos to a championship , an interview with team CEO Keia Clarke. Asked, "How active has ownership been in creating the Liberty's culture?", Clarke responded: Clara [Wu Tsai] is an amazing mind who sees the Liberty as having so much potential that she wanted to support it with her own resources, and I don't just mean financial resources. Clara does interviews, Clara invites celebrities to games, and Clara is the torchbearer for what this will be in the long term—and I can't ask for anything more than that. And they're doing it in the spirit of Brooklyn. The "You Belong Here. We Belong Here" sign that's in front of Barclays Center. That's Clara Wu Tsai's sign, vision, and mystique , and that's what she brings to the table every single day. So how could you not want to run through a wall and make sure that the business success and the KPIs are growing? (Emphasis added)...

Last week Bloomberg published a predictably reverential article, With the New York Liberty, Clara Wu Tsai Aims for the First $1 Billion Women’s Sports Franchise , which repeats the lore about the Tsais' (Clara and husband Joe Tsai, the Alibaba billionaire) savvy willingness to spend big, beyond the WNBA's salary cap, to make it a magnet for stars, and rebuild the fan base. The article also states, "They also bought the Nets’ home arena, the Barclays Center." Not quite. They own the operating company. The fig leaf of public ownership allows for a tax-exempt site and tax-exempt financing. Hotels and restaurants to help Brooklyn? From the article: Through the Liberty and Nets’ parent company, BSE Global , meanwhile, the Tsais are planning a major development initiative in the traffic-clogged area around Barclays. Adding hotels and restaurants, Wu Tsai says, will help draw more fans for the Liberty and Nets while also benefiting Brooklyn more broadly: Only a fraction of ...

Aiming to offer more amenities and compete for future talent--a locker room with players' "private suites," rooftop dining, and a childcare facility-- the New York Liberty yesterday announced ( link ) plans to build "an $80 million "state-of-the-art practice facility, spanning 75,000 square-feet, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on Newtown Creek and overlooking Manhattan’s iconic skyline."    From NY Liberty: helicopter view towards Greenpoint from Newtown Creek Well, it more overlooks Long Island City's impressive, if not quite iconic, skyline, as well as Greenpoint's also impressive-not-iconic skyline, as shown in images below. Looking west from Pulaski Bridge. Arrow =  approximate location. Photo: Norman Oder While the location wasn't specified, it's clear that the location is the northern tip of Manhattan Avenue, between Ash Street and Newtown Creek. Manhattan Avenue once led to the Vernon Avenue Bridge, but in 1954 was replaced by the P...

Eater on Jan. 29 reported, as part of a longer roundup, New grant fund gives $50,000 a piece to several Brooklyn food businesses : A new grant program backed by the co-owner of basketball teams the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty Liberty, along with Brooklyn arena Barclays Center announced the awardees of its funds this week. Revitalize Brooklyn — from co-owner of the Nets, Clara Wu Tsai’s Social Justice Fund — selected nine businesses based in the borough. These include Williamsburg cafe Buddies Coffee, Bed-Stuy bakery Fan Fan Doughnuts, Williamsburg butcher shop Meat Hook, frozen dumpling business Mimi Cheng’s, Greenpoint bakery and coffee roaster Paloma, and packaged overnight oats company Spoonful. Each business will get $50,000. The other recipients, unmentioned, are in the fashion sector, cited below. Note that the Social Justice Fund of the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation is referred to as Clara Wu Tsai's project. That takes the focus off her husband, more controver...