When I arrived, Prokhorov was standing in a V.I.P. corral with two dozen high-cheekboned knockouts in lethal heels and dresses that were more like plot summaries. The blue and gray plastic V.I.P. bracelets on their wrists made them look like a flock of banded herons. Most couldn’t have been more than 20 or 25, though it was hard to make a scientific evaluation with stroboscopic eruptions of green laser light exploding around the room. Prokhorov, in a striped gray suit, spent most of the night posted in the same spot, bobbing to the heavy beat, sipping club soda and occasionally chatting with a model bold enough to engage him.

But it was not the models who seemed to interest him so much as the fact that the V.I.P. area wasn’t completely segregated from the rest of the club, and he could “feel the energy” of the smartly dressed new Russians on the main dance floor, all moving in unison, building a little socialism for the night.

He left, as planned, on the dot of 3.

Thirteen Is One Better Than Twelve

It’s possible that the ability to alight on a volleyball is just the sort of skill a Russian billionaire would want jumping into a new business in a foreign country. But the footing in contemporary Russia is in some ways much trickier.

One late afternoon at the end of September, a month before the start of the N.B.A. season, Prokhorov was reclining on a gray padded chair in his Moscow office, a cup of tea in front of him. The role he’d envisioned for himself as owner of the Nets had more to do with long-term strategy than with day-to-day operations, but there was still plenty of work left to get the project started. In two weeks the team would be stopping over in Moscow for a day to meet the new boss, make some appearances­ and then head off to China for two exhibition games. With their Russian ownership, the Nets had suddenly become one of the unlikely leaders of the N.B.A.’s efforts to gin up new business by “globalizing” its brand. (Despite relatively healthy attendance and TV ratings, the league reported losing $380 million last season.) The brand-building preseason games in China were arranged when the team had a seven-foot Chinese forward named Yi Jianlian as well as a Mandarin speaker in the marketing department. But with Proky’s arrival, the Nets were suddenly covered with Russian dressing: a new Russian-language Web site, an office in Moscow, a five-year deal with Stolichnaya vodka. Worse, they were bound for China without Yi, who had been packed off to the Washington Wizards in June, or the Mandarin whiz, who’d been globalized out of a job. Ni hao? Nyet!

Now the season opener at the Prudential Center was less than a month away. Prokhorov was planning to fly over for the first three home games. As he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes a moment — it had been a long day, a hectic summer — I remembered a time in July, when we traipsed down to the Moscow River to a boathouse in the flood plain where he kept a naval strike force of Rickter skis. He squirmed into a padded wet suit and then jumped into the tea-colored water, a side channel off the main flow. The water was warm; God knows what was in it. He was up and away in no time on the Rickter ski, hulking over the tippy hull like an adolescent on a toddler’s bike. You could see the grasshopper in the Lada. At the touch of the throttle, the engine screamed like a furious chain saw, and he came ripping past the dock where a bunch of his friends were standing and then banked sharply, fanning up a tail of spray that sent them all dashing for cover. Out on the open water again, he gunned the craft in a hard circle, then cut back across the wave he’d raised, and the ski shot into the air, climbing the late gold light of a Moscow summer evening until Prokhorov was upside down with the 300-pound machine arcing over his head. He pulled it around full circle, thumping back into the water with a billowy thud. Again and again, he roiled the river and flung the Rickter ski off the waves through back flips and barrel rolls.

It dawned on me while I watched that he was chauffeured everywhere in Moscow — working while the driver coped with the traffic — and that this was his chance to steer. More than that: this was his chance to cut loose, to revel in a rush of unbuttoned adolescent freedom. The oligarchs of Russia aren’t exactly paper tigers, but those who aren’t in jail or exile understand the precariousness of their position, the importance of keeping the favor of the Kremlin. Last February, Prokhorov was publicly criticized by Putin for neglecting to fulfill promised investments in an electricity-generating project in southern Russia. Prokhorov initially had the temerity to say the prime minister was misinformed, but then, on further review, conceded that yes, the prime minister, whom he first met in 1994 at a bank opening in St. Petersburg, where Putin was the deputy mayor, was correct. When Prokhorov was angling for the Nets, he got the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, to mention his plans to President Barack Obama, as if U.S. politicians perforce had some say in how billionaires deployed their capital. At home, Prokhorov was at pains to stress how owning the Nets might benefit Russian basketball programs, enabling him to import N.B.A. “technology,” training regimens, coaching methods, sports medicine.

It was nearly dark when Prokhorov eased his ski up onto a trailer and emerged from the water. We stood around the stony landing as the day faded. He was not the invisible oligarch to an army of red ants. They began to swarm his ankles and wrists at first and somehow scaled his wet suit and got onto the back of his neck. He brushed them off, he tried slapping, but there were too many, and finally he waded back into the river and reclined into the sanctuary of the water with his eyes closed until just his head was clear.