Stephon Marbury Transforms Former Toys “R” Us into Sports Complex

The Toys “R” Us sign has long gone dark on Flatbush Avenue, but the cavernous Brooklyn storefront is finally getting a second life—and it’s all about a different kind of game.

Stephon Marbury, the former New York Knicks point guard and Coney Island native, is teaming up with Wellball to transform the long-abandoned space into a sprawling indoor sports complex. The plan: turn the old toy paradise into a permanent playground for adults and kids built around pickleball, paddle sports, flag football and, at its heart, a new shooting-focused game that wants to do for basketball what pickleball did for tennis.

This will be Wellball’s Brooklyn flagship, a centerpiece venue for a sport that barely existed a few years ago. There’s no official opening date yet, but the stakes are clear. The building has sat empty since Toys “R” Us shut its U.S. stores in 2018. Now, instead of dust and dead neon, southern Brooklyn is set to gain a major indoor recreation hub.

Wellball bills itself as “the pickleball of basketball,” and the comparison fits. Strip away the clutter, keep the fun. The game is built around one-on-one shooting duels. No dribbling. No defense. No full-court sprints. Just you, the rim, and “The Well,” a device mounted on the hoop that channels the flow of the contest and forces players to lock in on their accuracy.

Every possession becomes a test of touch and rhythm, not vertical leap. Without the chaos of drives and contact, the game opens up to people who might never set foot in a traditional run. Height and speed matter less than a repeatable stroke. Rounds move quickly. Players cycle in and out. The whole design is meant to make it easy to join, hard to walk away from.

“Everybody wants to shoot,” Marbury told Scoop B, summing up the game’s appeal in a single line. He didn’t hold back on its potential either: “Wellball, I believe will be the next… the next wave of how people are able to compete and still do something that they love to do.”

The man behind the concept is Omar Wellington, a former Division I guard at Sacred Heart University. After college, Wellington built a career training players from youth hopefuls to NBA names, including Rick and Jalen Brunson. That background—seeing where players struggle, where they shine, and what keeps them coming back—helped shape Wellball’s stripped-down format.

Marbury hasn’t just lent his name. He has captained in Wellball’s VIP league and quickly emerged as one of its loudest advocates, using his profile to push the sport into the broader basketball conversation.

For him, the Flatbush Avenue project is more than a business move. It’s a return to the borough that made him. Marbury grew up in Coney Island, starred at Abraham Lincoln High School, and later carried the Knicks’ backcourt from 2004 to 2009. Now “Starbury” is coming home, not to chase points under the Garden lights, but to build a new kind of court culture in Brooklyn.

The toys are gone. The games, it seems, are just getting started.