The Nets and their parent company, BSE Global, are celebrating the 10th anniversary of Barclays Center this month. It was September 28, 2012 that the arena opened with eight nights of Jay-Z which included the introduction of the Nets black-and-white jersey that the Brooklyn rapper had a hand in designing.
But six years earlier, the chances that a new arena would rise at Flatbush and Atlantic was far from a sure thing. Bruce Ratner envisioned the arena, then unnamed, as the centerpiece of a $6.4 billion, 16-building complex rising in part over the Atlantic Yards, the city’s third busiest transit station and the busiest outside of Manhattan.