From an office suite on NE 183^rd Street, Jeffrey Rosen is busily remaking the landscape of Israeli sports through his ownership of the Maccabi Haifa basketball team.

And in the process, he’s giving Aventura basketball fans a chance to root, albeit from quite a distance, for the city’s first pro team.

Davon Jefferson of Maccabi Haifa dunks over an opposing player.

Rosen spent most of his career building Rose Art into a power in the international toy market, with sales topping $300 million a year. Then he turned his attention to building Triangle Financial Services, a sports and entertainment investment firm based in his adopted home of Aventura.

Andrew Wilson, the firm’s marketing director, explains Rosen’s longtime interest in baseball led him to invest in a semi-professional team in Hong Kong, where Rose Art had a business presence. While baseball continues to struggle to find a toe-hold in Hong Kong, the investment in the Dragonflies was a useful introduction into what might be in the realm of international sports. And an investment in the ill-fated Israeli professional baseball league followed.

With the 2007 purchase of the Maccabi Haifa basketball team, Rosen and Triangle applied their marketing powers to building on an existing model. The first year, the perennial second-division team fought its way into the first division and challenged renowned Maccabi Tel Aviv in the league’s championship round.

A local marketing campaign made the players into heroes in Israel’s third largest city. Life-sized banners of the players line the streets, Wilson says.

Now Maccabi Haifa is raising the profile of Israel’s premier basketball league in America through a series of relationships with broadcast giants including ESPN, Versus, Direct TV, the YES Network in New York and the SUN Network in Florida.

This season, the Haifa club made international headlines with the signing of San Diego high school basketball star Jeremy Tyler, the first U.S. player to leave high school early for a pro career. Tyler’s odyssey has been featured on ESPN’s Outside the Lines program.

At 18, Tyler stands 6’11” and, at over 250 pounds, has a body that soon will be ready for the NBA draft. But until he’s eligible for the draft in 2011, he’s working on developing his game in Israel where the competition is much tougher. In his high school league, Tyler averaged close to 30 points per game; in Haifa, he’s battling for playing time against men with a decade more experience.

Tyler’s decision to sign a $140,000 a year contract with Haifa is just one example of the potential power of American ownership to transform the Israeli basketball league.

Rosen, who Wilson describes as a hands-on owner, moved the team’s tryout camp to Nova Southeastern University in nearby Davie. There a collection of American college players competed for spots alongside international players. It’s a competition that Rosen hopes will improve the team’s talent pool, now and in the future.

The further exposure of the Haifa team and the Israeli Premier League is designed to expand interest in the league, Wilson explains. Haifa games, which draw an average of about 2,000 spectators live, draw a comparable audience in South Florida when the games are streamed live, in English, on Triangle’s website -- http://trianglefs.com. The games are played Sunday afternoons, Eastern time.

Maccabi Haifa is also getting U.S. exposure through a weekly reality program “Inside Israeli Basketball” that will follow American players through the season. It will appear on SUN Sports, YES, Versus and the Jewish Life channel. There also are tie-ins with TV.com, Sling.com and YouTube.com.

In October, Triangle launched a Maccabi Haifa basketball channel under a distribution deal with Metacafe. Triangle owns the North American television and Internet distribution rights to Israeli Premier League basketball.

Wilson says Triangle is eager to establish Haifa as Israeli’s team for America. Toward that end, Haifa Hoops for Kids, a charitable endeavor modeled on the NBA’s tickets for kids program, has been established. The idea is that North American fans can donate to the charity that delivers basketball tickets to needy kids in Israel.

Wilson says a South Florida exhibition by Maccabi Haifa – like the one Maccabi Tel Aviv recently played in New York’s Madison Square Garden – is possible next year.

Meanwhile, Triangle is also busy in other areas.

Partner Barry Rosen, a film and TV producer with a long string of credits including “Zorro” and The Highlander”, is involved in a Broadway musical based on Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities.”

A fledgling sports agency represents a handful of clients and is expecting to add more.

And there are renewed plans to grow a professional baseball league in Israel.

It’s clear the vision from those offices on NE 183^rd Street extend well beyond the Intracoastal Waterway.