This is a young, star-less Lithuanian team, feeling its way when basketball's global expansion seems to have flattened from the dizzying summer of 1992.
Schulman was savvy enough to know, however, that an expansion basketball franchise would need marketing help, and at the time Volchok was perhaps the most successful entertainment promoter in the region.
The latter is the dominant concern of too many leaders of higher education; it trumps the academic interests of the players and institutions and the desires of fans, whether it's the basketball tournament's expansion or the insistence on keeping the antiquated football bowl game schedule.
Robert L. Johnson, the founder of the Black Entertainment Television network and the winner in the bidding for an expansion basketball franchise in Charlotte, N.C., earlier this week, has hired Lehman Brothers Inc. to help him buy a Major League Baseball team and move it to Washington, according to a Lehman banker.
Ideas that either weren't voted on or didn't garner a majority vote included soccer and football fields, additional picnic structures, a dog park, an expanded concert area, a skate park, basketball and handball courts, and expansion of the Orange County Model Engineers' train route.
Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, was awarded Charlotte's new professional basketball franchise by the NBA's expansion committee.
Alter, a lawyer/real estate executive and a former college basketball player, started the Sky as an expansion franchise in 2006, seeking to provide professional opportunities for female athletes, as well as strong role models.
Drexler, in the British capital to help promote the first regular-season N.B.A. games to be played in London in March, said that basketball has proven itself in Europe and expansion there may just be a matter of time.
But the eventual expansion of top-quality college basketball throughout the country diluted the influence of the New York colleges.
BASKETBALL American Basketball Association ABA--Awarded an expansion franchise to Pensacola, Fla., for the 2004-05 season to be called the Aviators.
