It’s July, which means we are in the midst of what is traditionally the slowest time of the year for sports. The NBA and Stanley Cup Finals are over, pro and college football are in between mini camps and training camps, and the Olympics are still six weeks away. Tiger Woods’ injury, which will keep him sidelined until 2009, has diminished our collective casual interest in golf. Tennis, lacking any engaging personalities or rivalries outside of Federer/Nadal & the Williams sisters, blips on the radar from time to time. Even in political competition, the presidential election is in the summer doldrums, as the nominees look to raise money and select running mates before the conventions in August. Baseball persists, its pace matching perfectly our own, as we take off early on Fridays, head to the movies to see Batman or Indiana Jones, drive to the beach, grill out, drink ice cold beers and watch or listen to the games that always seem to be on in the background. In other words, it’s a great, relaxing, lazy time of year. I don’t even really feel like typing, as the heat from my laptop is raising my body temperature and, probably, sterilizing me. But it’s a good time to talk about something that, at the risk of sounding like I have an “East Coast bias,” is pretty exciting: The return of major league sports to Brooklyn.

For the 2009-10 season the NBA’s New Jersey Nets will begin playing their home games in downtown Brooklyn. For those of you unfamiliar with documentaries awash in sepia-toned photographs, George Will interviews, and ragtime soundtracks, the Los Angeles Dodgers used to play in Brooklyn, until they unceremoniously pulled up the stakes and headed west in 1957. Since then, the idea of a major league team locating here, and belonging solely to the 2.5 million people in this borough of New York City, seemed like a quaint but outdated notion from a simpler time in pro sports. With all of the Houstons and Charlottes and Jacksonvilles booming across the sun belt, what argument could this dense city-within-a-city make to convince a team to move here?

But economic booms can happen anywhere, and the explosion of commercial development that began in Manhattan in the mid-90s has refused to relent, spilling over the river to Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Not a week goes by without a new neighborhood touted as “up and coming,” followed by complaints that the same neighborhood has been “gentrified.” Starbucks, Jamba Juice, and wine-and-cheese bars follow. Some longtime residents disparage these young, urban settlers invading their territories, but this is nothing new – surely the Lenape Indians who once walked this ground had an equivalent term for “yuppie douchebag.” And now the NBA is coming, and along with it a multi-tiered commercial and residential complex that will forever change Brooklyn’s landscape. This makes perfect sense: The NBA has been mining new markets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America since at least 1992. Why not in its own backyard, which so many Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans call home?