TOKYO — Toyota Motor Corp., contemporary off sponsoring final 12 months’s Tokyo Summer time Olympics, is diving into sports activities once more.

This time, Toyota will construct a bay-side enviornment for a Japanese professional basketball group with one of many wildest names within the large world of sports activities: the Alvark.

The stadium, to seat 10,000 followers when it opens in 2025, would be the new dwelling court docket for the Toyota Alvark Tokyo, knowledgeable Japan league group backed by the world’s greatest automaker.

The plan, unveiled Monday, will redevelop an space of the Tokyo waterfront the place Toyota lengthy had a sprawling automobile showroom, auditorium, check drive and model expertise heart.

Toyota’s Mega Net facility shut down in December, shortly after President Akio Toyoda used the house for its final main occasion, to unveil the corporate’s long-term imaginative and prescient for electrical automobiles.

Toyoda, who performed area hockey in his youth and nonetheless will get behind the wheel in motorsports, mentioned his firm attracts inspiration from the never-say-die perspective of athletes.

One in all Toyota’s exterior administrators, for instance, is a former basketball participant with a string of medals from a storied profession in worldwide competitors. Philip Craven performed the game from a wheelchair after an accident left him with out the usage of his legs at age 16. Craven can be a former president of the Worldwide Paralympic Committee.

“This new enviornment challenge incorporates two concepts of ours. The primary is to point out ‘gratitude to sports activities and athletes.’ The second is to offer ‘continued help to individuals who push their potential,’ ” he mentioned in a information launch. “I consider that sports activities have the ability to offer us all braveness.”

Mega Net opened in 1999, and Toyota estimates 127 million individuals visited it over time.

The mighty Alvark, twice champions of Japan’s B.League for males’s skilled basketball, presently play in a stadium in a western a part of Tokyo removed from downtown. The brand new enviornment will deliver the group nearer to town heart and assist anchor a well-liked purchasing space.

The group moniker is a artistic amalgam of phrases, in true Japanese style.

It begins with an English transliteration of the Arabic phrase for “electrical shock.” This, Toyota says, “displays the keenness of a group that performs in an electrifying type.” The “Al” is Arabic for “the,” and the “V” stands for “victory.” Mix that with “ark,” as in a large boat that may climate any storm, and, says Toyota, “Alvark additionally signifies an ark that carries the group to victory.”

The group was once known as the Pacers.

Two Individuals play on the Alvark, together with 6-foot-11-inch heart Alex Kirk, who had a quick stint with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The group’s mascot is a pudgy, purple bearlike creature named Luke.