AMERICA AT LARGE:IN A five-day stretch that commenced last Wednesday night, the New Jersey Nets surprised the basketball world, along with themselves, winning three of four games and thereby depriving themselves of a place in the record book.

Prior to going on that mini-tear, the Nets had managed to win just seven of their first 70 games, and were considered no worse than even money to secure their position as the worst team in professional basketball history by undercutting the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers, whose 9-73 mark was preserved as the all-time standard for NBA futility.

That startling run capped a March filled with significant milestones for the Nets, and there was the sense this resurgence might have been somewhat disappointing to the team’s new owner-in-waiting, Mikhail Prokhorov.

On Sunday – the night before the Nets notched win number 10 in San Antonio – Prokhorov had been the subject of a nationally-televised profile on CBS’ 60 Minutes, in which he had pointed out there was “only one direction to go: up” from the Nets’ woeful position, and seemed to be guaranteeing he, or he and his money, would personally be the agent of that turnaround.

The scenario posed by a dodgy Russian zillionaire acquiring a moribund franchise and attempting to buy his way to a championship is, of course, a more familiar tale across the ocean than in the US. And while Prokhorov’s name has been familiar to basketball fans in both Brooklyn and New Jersey since September (when he provisionally acquired an 80 per cent stake in the Nets contingent on his relocating the franchise from the latter to the former), it is safe to say until the 60 Minutes episode aired, most Americans probably thought Prokhorov was the guy who wrote Peter and the Wolf.

And, the truth be known, if you’d asked me last week I’d have told you I couldn’t pick Mikhail Prokhorov out of a line-up, but that was before I learned he stands (depending on who’s measuring) either 6ft 7ins, 6ft 8ins, or 6ft 9 ins tall.

(In announcing his investment, Prokhorov had boasted he would be “the first NBA owner who can dunk”, but a few days before the worst-record mark slipped from the Nets’ grasp, he was frustrated in that quest, too, when the league’s Board of Governors approved the application of a group headed by Michael Jordan – who reputedly can also dunk – to purchase the Carolina Bobcats.)

Now the question has become: if and when Prokhorov’s bid is approved and the team relocates from New Jersey to New York, will they change their name to the NYets? The peripatetic Nets’ history has been a star-crossed one since their 1967 founding as a charter member of the late American Basketball Association.

When the ABA folded after nine seasons, the Nets were its champions, and one of three ABA teams absorbed into the NBA. A case could be made that the Nets, and their star player, Julius Erving, were most responsible for that merger, but they paid a price for their elevation to the big time: forced to pay buy-in fees of $8 million (€6m) – $3.2 million (€2.4m) as an NBA entry fee, plus $4.8 million (€3.6m) to the Knicks for “invading their territory” – they raised the cash for the tribute by selling Doctor J to the 76ers — a transaction that affected the fortunes of both clubs.

Since their inception the Nets have played their “home” games in at least a dozen arenas in New Jersey and Long Island. The present season will end their tenancy at the Izod Center in the Meadowlands. Next year they will take up residence at the Prudential Center in Newark, which will be their home court until the completion of the Barclay’s Center in Brooklyn.

The team has more or less been held hostage by the Brooklyn Arena situation for the past half-dozen years. When the Nets were unable to work out a new lease arrangement in the Meadowlands, they were acquired by Forest City Ratner, which initially planned to relocate the team to Brooklyn by this season.

Ratner’s principal interest all along had been the development of a 22-acre Prospect Heights property known as the Atlantic Yards; the arena wasn’t completely an afterthought, but it wasn’t the first item on their agenda.

The past few years haven’t been much kinder to the world of real estate than they have been to the Nets, and, faced with a drop-dead date of December 31st, they cut Prokhorov in on the deal, in which the Russian tycoon assumed responsibility for 80 per cent of the Nets’ outstanding debt and 45 per cent ownership in the Barclay’s Center.

The most high-profile minority investor remains Shawn Corey Carter, who raps under the name Jay-Z. Mr Z is said to be worth $500 million (€371m), which rates him a comparative pauper alongside Prokhorov, who is (once again depending on who’s measuring) either the richest or the second-richest man in Russia.

Prokhorov’s prior experience in the sport came as a part-owner of CKSA Moscow. During his 13-year-tenure there, the club wound up with the highest payroll of any basketball team in the world outside the NBA.

Although to all appearances NBA commissioner David Stern has welcomed him with open arms, Prokhorov seems to be maintaining a discreet distance pending his approval by the Board of Governors, who are allegedly vetting his financial history. Thus it was when the official ground-breaking ceremony at Brooklyn Yards took place on March 10th, the Nets were represented not by Prokhorov but by Comrade Jay-Z and his wife, the singer Beyonce Knowles.

Just how thorough this “investigation” will be remains to be learned, but since some of the people doing the investigating have fairly checkered pasts of their own, the best guess is: Not Very. Put it this way: neither Stern nor any of Prokhorov’s prospective brethren owners seemed disturbed in the least by the revelations of Sunday’s 60 Minutes episode: * He built his fortune virtually from scratch, largely in the metals trade, in a Yeltsin-era Russia he likens to “the Wild West – a territory with no sheriff”, but maintained it had been at least 15 years since he last bribed a government official.

*In January of 2007 Prokhorov was jailed for four days by French police, who had charged him with promoting prostitution after he flew in a planeload of Russian party girls for the entertainment of two dozen holidaying guests and business associates at Corchevel. (“Now there,” said Nicolas Sarkozy, at the time the French Minister of the Interior, “is a man who wants to please.”)

Unamused by the undesired scrutiny forthcoming from the aforementioned scandal, Vladimir Potanin, Prokhorov’s partner in Norilsk Nickel, forced him to sell. He did, and thus escaped whole when the bottom fell out of the metals market just days later.

It would be surprising indeed if the league found any of the aforementioned a reason to bar a man whose net worth is estimated at $10 billion (€7.5 billion).

His intention, on the other hand, “to incorporate a young, talented Russian manager with a successful background in European basketball into the team’s management” may make some of them downright nervous.