SANTA FE, N.M. — Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and his counterpart with the Knicks, James L. Dolan, were early suspects, as were any other N.B.A. executives who had ever squabbled with Mikhail D. Prokhorov, the Russian billionaire owner of the Nets. Or perhaps the culprit was an old rival of Prokhorov’s from back home in Russia, where oligarchs have been known to make enemies.
Anything seemed possible over the past two years, as Nets fans looking for a schedule or a score typed “nets.com” into their web browsers and were redirected to a curious variety of distinctly non-Nets sites: an amateurishly designed page with a photo of Cuban sticking out his tongue; the personal home page of Jason Kidd, who had a messy split with the Nets this summer after a single season as their coach; an All-Star team ballot for the Knicks.
The Nets do not own the Internet domain name Nets.com, and whoever does has been playing a yearslong joke on the team’s fans. The website Deadspin and others highlighted the antics, but exactly who was posting the material has been a mystery.
“If you come out here, I’m going to make you help us with the New York Times crossword puzzle first,” Jane Hill, 69, of Santa Fe, told an inquiring reporter over the weekend. Hill, a former fine-arts photographer and a Bard College graduate, is the person behind one of the biggest mysteries in the history of the Nets.
In her first interview about the site, which began over a plate of scrambled eggs and sliced tomatoes in a Santa Fe diner, Hill came clean. She wants the Nets, or someone, to buy Nets.com. And she wants millions for it.
“We’ve had fun with the mystery of it all,” she said with a smile.
The Nets’ front office, however, is less amused. The team has strongly rejected the $5 million price tag Hill put on the domain name.
“Our website is BrooklynNets.com, and our fans know this is our site,” said Barry Baum, a team spokesman. “Brooklyn Nets is our brand, and we have no interest in Nets.com, despite the shameful efforts of the registrant to attempt to sell us this domain name for seven figures.”
What the Nets called shameful Hill calls smart business. As the owner of Cyber Mesa Telecom, a small telephone and Internet provider that employs about two dozen people in a low-slung office a half-mile from the city’s rodeo ground, she is a natural entrepreneur with an eclectic résumé: She operated a travel agency and a hotel in Greece before turning to photography, specializing in capturing the nuances of metallic sculptures.
“Bronze is very difficult to photograph,” Hill said.
Hill said that in the late 1980s, not long after moving to Santa Fe, a picturesque town known for its vibrant arts scene, she decided to invest in “a funky little computer store,” which she and her partners called Roadrunner Computer Solutions. In 1999, with the dot-com boom in full swing, Hill sold the domain name Roadrunner.com to Time Warner for a seven-figure sum, a sale that was never publicly disclosed.
That experience has apparently emboldened Hill to seek a similar sum from the Nets. In 1996, she paid $20,000 to acquire 500 subscribers from an Internet provider that was leaving the industry, and Nets.com happened to be the domain associated with it. She said 50 people or so still used Nets.com email addresses.
“It’s a word in the dictionary,” she said, touting the domain’s potential value.
When she heard the Nets were making a splashy move to Brooklyn, she thought it would be a good time to ask her lawyer to make them an offer. When the team declined, Hill was hardly deterred.
“We were determined not to be malicious in any way, but we did want to get a little bit of attention,” she said.
She got plenty of attention with the first prank website, which featured the photo of Cuban and the banner: “Looking for the New Jersey Nets? Looking for the Brooklyn Nets? They’re not here ... but they SHOULD be!”
At the bottom of the page was a message written in Russian that translated roughly to “Mikhail, are you watching? Vilena wants to know.”
The website Complex posted an article with the headline “Did Mark Cuban Buy Nets.com to Take Shots at the Brooklyn Nets and their Owner Mikhail Prokhorov?” And “Vilena,” according to one widely promulgated theory, was the name of a woman involved in an incident in 2007 in which Prokhorov was questioned in a prostitution inquiry in France.
In fact, Hill said, Vilena was simply the name of a Russian woman in her accounting department who had helped type the message.
The Nets did not budge; neither did Hill. Bouncing Nets fans to the nether corners of the Internet became the pet project of her 37-year-old son, John, who operates the company’s voice switch.
John Hill is a sports junkie who follows the San Francisco 49ers, the Detroit Pistons and the Mets; earlier this year, he sent the Nets faithful to Mets.com. He said he took pride in coming up with references that were a step below the obvious, like the switch to Kidd’s website or a redirection to the Boston Celtics home page, which he did after the Nets completed a high-profile trade to get Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett.
“The one compliment I take to heart is when people say, ‘This is the ultimate troll,’ ” he said. “There’s some joy in that.”
Like all major sports teams, the Nets devote considerable resources to producing original content on their website and social media accounts. They bought BrooklynNets.com before their move to the borough in 2012 for an undisclosed sum. The cat-and-mouse game with Hill has proved more of a nuisance than a true threat to the team’s bottom line.
Still, the Hills refuse to throw in the towel, and they remain confident that they can cash in on Nets.com in the seven-figure range. After all, John Hill pointed out, Whisky.com sold for $3.1 million last year.
This month, he put the domain name on eBay to test the public market for it.
“Maybe you are the proprietor of the world’s pre-eminent manufacturer of tennis court nets? Fishnets? Volleyball nets? Goalpost nets?” his listing reads. “Or, maybe you just happen to have a basketball team of the same name?”