Plenty has happened to the franchise relocation business since the last time a franchise was located in Brooklyn.

In the meantime, pro sports teams have become more prized than good schools. They've moved more often than Larry Brown. They've been good neighbors and bad, economic engines in some cities and sinkholes in others, but they've never failed to turn a profit in any of them.

Their owners have become every bit as mercenary as the free agents they moan about, which is why the price of everything from souvenirs to stadiums has gone through the roof. Presented with an ever-growing list of demands, dreamy towns desperate to become ``destinations'' made themselves willing hostages and taxpayers signed on as reluctant ones. In the end, the distinction hardly mattered. Despite some delays and a few notable exceptions, everybody forked over the money, anyway.

The size of the deal needed to move the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn is staggering, and there are years of cost overruns still ahead. The team went for $300 million. A new arena in the heart of Brooklyn is targeted at $435 million, and Bruce Ratner, the real estate mogul who bought the Nets, envisions it as the anchor of a $2.5 billion commercial and residential complex designed by noted architect Frank Gehry.

According to community activists, he'll have to steamroll upward of 800 homes to build it, and nothing will happen without a fight.

For those reasons and countless others, most franchise moves deserve little sympathy. So why does this one seem like such a good fit?

``You go anywhere in the country, you ask anyone, what's the capital of basketball,'' hoops legend Bernard King told the New York Post, ``and they'll say Brooklyn.''

King grew up just a few blocks from the site where the arena is supposed to land, in an apartment building with basketball playgrounds on either side. Before he left Brooklyn to make a name for himself at Tennessee and later with the nearby Knicks, he practically wore the concrete off those courts.

In winter, King and a few friends shoveled snow so they could play pickup ball in the cold. Long before that, Red Auerbach, who put together a Celtics dynasty in Boston, roamed the same territory looking for a game.

So did Connie Hawkins and World B. Free, Chris Mullin, Fly Williams, Stephon Marbury and another dozen of the game's most entertaining souls. And hip-hop performer Jay Z, a member of the new ownership group, is already in place to become the Nets' answer to Knicks superfan Spike Lee.

But a rival, a ready-made legacy and a population that makes Brooklyn the fourth-largest city in country aren't the only things the borough has going for it.

``It's eerie,'' said King, talking to The New York Times in his role as unpaid ambassador for Ratner's group. ``The arena site at Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues has been sitting there waiting for this moment in time ever since Walter O'Malley wanted it for a Dodger ballpark that would have replaced Ebbets Field.''

O'Malley never got it, of course, and moved his baseball team to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. So there's a little bit of justice to the idea of another team moving back.

Whether it's ultimately workable and a good idea in the bargain will depend almost entirely on whether Ratner is as smart and committed as he is rich.

He's going to lose a ton of money at the Meadowlands for the rest of the Nets' stay there, which could stretch out as long as 10 years.

They've won successive Eastern Conference titles, but already rank near the bottom of the league's attendance table. And the locals don't figure to get any friendlier.

George Zoffinger, who's in charge of the state sports agency that operates the complex where the Nets play, said the team's former owners ``basically stabbed the people of New Jersey in the back.''

The real story is a lot more complicated.

Ray Chambers and Lewis Katz are sharp-eyed businessmen who bought the team for $150 million in 1998 and doubled their money. But they had a soft side, too. Chambers and Katz set up an ownership group called the Community Youth Organization with a plan to move the Nets into Newark to jump-start a battered economy and pour some of the profits into a charity.

Instead, they lost millions. Worn out after a half-dozen years of bureaucratic wrangling, they finally cashed out and decided to let Ratner try his hand.

If the sledding proved tough across the state line, just imagine what lies ahead. New York is New Jersey on steroids. Every permit will be like pulling teeth, and even if Ratner secures enough of them, every shovelful of dirt will cost him double.

But that's the beauty of doing business anywhere in New York. The only thing that outweighs the potential risk is the potential reward, and the last time anybody even had the guts to try was a long, long time ago.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke@ap.org