The brains behind an up-and-coming national basketball league is looking to score a sale of his Manhattan apartment.
Jeff Kwatinetz, a founder of the burgeoning three-on-three hoops league Big3, has listed his 3,400-square-foot co-op in NoHo for $5.8 million, according to an ad that appeared Tuesday.
Kwatinetz paid $3.8 million for the one-bedroom loft-style unit on Broadway in 2010, according to the city register.
Located in a toffee-toned prewar former bank building at Bleecker Street, the unit features arched windows, a primary suite with a dressing room and a bookshelf-lined study that offers a screening room en-suite.
Kwatinetz also seems to have tried to unload the property in 2017 for $10 million, according to StreetEasy. The price has been sharply reduced this time around to be attractive in a market that has slumped for years amid high interest rates but has recently shown signs of renewed strength.
Kwatinetz‘s early claim to fame was his takedown of longtime Hollywood power agent Michael Ovitz. Kwatinetz‘s Hollywood talent agency The Firm, founded in 1997, was initially focused on musicians—early clients included Backstreet Boys, Korn and Britney Spears. It bought out Ovitz’s struggling Artists Management Group in 2002 in a merger that verged on a hostile takeover, according to news reports.
Former White House adviser Steve Bannon, then a partner at The Firm, apparently personally intervened to play hardball with Ovitz to get him to accept a much lower price than Kwatinetz had negotiated. In the end, though, the deal supposedly closed for close to the original undisclosed amount, according to The New Yorker. Bannon left Hollywood soon after and years later would become a controversial member of President Donald Trump’s first administration.
In 2017, after a fizzled attempt to find an online audience for canceled TV soap operas, Kwatinetz teamed with rapper and actor Ice Cube to launch Big3, a harder-edged, faster-paced version of more traditional three-on-three games. Trash talk is allowed, and players must take a shot within 14 seconds. (The NBA, whose courts feature five-on-five play, has a 24-second shot clock, by contrast.)
The Big3, which holds its seasons in the summer, may be hitting its stride. For the first time this year, many of the league’s eight teams, including in Miami, Los Angeles and Houston, are no longer owned by Kwatinetz, Ice Cube and investors but instead by private owners, who reportedly paid $10 million per franchise. Players, many ex-NBA stars, reportedly earn at least $10,000 a game and up to $100,000 a year, and an average of more than 500,000 viewers watch each game on CBS, the league says.
The league’s eighth season tips off June 14.
Compass agent Philip Scheinfeld, who has the NoHo listing, did not return an email for comment by press time.
