I was born and raised in Manhattan, just a couple years before the New Jersey Nets leapt directly from the basement to consecutive NBA Finals appearances. I remember Mikki Moore as my power forward, not Kenyon Martin, and I never experienced or felt particularly connected to the Jersey Pride dripping off the best Nets teams of the early 2000s.
I understand now that was a perfect marriage between franchise and fanbase, if not economically, then spiritually. The nation’s most insecure state embraced
a small-market team that always beat the Knicks and Celtics, whose success was repeatedly name-checked in The Sopranos, but remained firmly the underdog. The team started winning after they traded the “selfish,” NYC-born Stephon Marbury for Jason Kidd, who ran — what else? — the Princeton offense dutifully. And thanks to the league’s best defense, Kidd got to throw plenty of dazzling, no-look passes in transition.
The Nets were was tough, fundamentally sound, and flashy, in that order. New Jersey’s self-conscious pride swelled, and shows you how weak the Eastern Conference is became the NBA equivalent of it’s just a highway surrounded by factories.
You likely know the rest of the story, but if not, Secret Base has a refresher on the rest of the Jersey years…
Now they are the Brooklyn Nets, playing their home games at Barclays Center, which sits on the edge of Prospect Heights. Bruce Ratner’s vision, in part, came true. Today, Barclays Center — unlike the Nets’ previous homes — is reliably full even when the team isn’t good, this year reporting an average attendance of 17,404 per game, or 99.18% of its listed capacity.
Most of those 17,404 are not Nets fans. If a star player like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Giannis Antetokounmpo is on the visiting team — not to mention the LeBron James/Steph Curry class — the building bursts with their jerseys. This is also true for regional opponents like the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks, boasting huge fanbases that always travel well. Earlier this season, Jaylen Brown got “M-V-P” chants at the ’Clays.
Obviously, the Nets have been very bad over the last three seasons. They no longer have star-power on the roster. It’s no secret that the franchise’s move to Brooklyn only brought them deeper into Knicks-occupied territory, but the current state of the team plays a role here too.
Former Nets Bruce Brown and Theo Pinson described the crowd dynamic very well on the latter’s podcast a couple years ago…
Speaking about the 2021 playoff environment: “Their fans just love basketball. They’re there for the game. Like sometimes, it’s not for just Brooklyn, they’re just there for the game … They want to see a good basketball game. They want to see dunks, they’ll cheer for anybody, they don’t care who team you on.”
D’Angelo Russell echoed the sentiment last season: “They’re ready to just blow the roof off this place if you give them a reason. That may be for the opposing team, they may give them that reason a lot of the time. Or we can.”
When the Nets were briefly a winning team led by recognizable superstars, the crowd was behind them. They also attracted more young fans in the Clean Sweep years, namely their most impressionable targets: the children of millennial transplants.
But whether the Brooklyn Nets are good at bad at any given moment hardly affects the wider conversation about their fanbase…
(Notice that this clip from The Zach Lowe Show comes via a New York Knicks fan account, reveling in the cheapest way to unite their followers while extracting argumentative replies.)
So much handwringing over the Nets’ fanbase, but so little about what it means to actually be a Nets fan, two decades removed the peak of the fandom’s local pride. Blogger extraordinaire Ock Sportello is the leader of the genre — this post titled Who Are Nets Fans? in particular is a classic, explaining the “gentrifier’s anxiety” that now unites both team and fanbase.
These are the pathologies that condition Nets fandom. We are fans of the team who blacked out the stands upon moving, a move that not incidentally obscured how few people attended games. We are fans who ask, with bated breath, how the crowd looked or sounded on any given night.
About a month ago, I was on CT Rail, watching a nationally televised Cavs-Knicks game on my laptop. An exuberant ticket-checker noticed, asking me what the score was. I replied and mentioned that Jalen Brunson had just made three shots in a row. I noticed the Knicks pin affixed to her shirt as she complained about Karl-Anthony Towns and having to move from the city to Connecticut. I told her I didn’t envy her. She chuckled and said “at least Brunson’s got us this year,” at which point I told her I couldn’t wait for the playoffs, which hey, that’s the truth.
The ticket-checker strolled away. My girlfriend, sitting in the window seat, called me a name I’m not going to repeat here.
Can Nets fans be proud? Does that pride have to come from rooting for a team that plays in the same borough where Jean-Michel Basquiat and Christopher Wallace were born over a half-century ago, as the organization so often reminds us?
Perhaps that pride can sound like Josh Minott did after the Nets lost to the Knicks last Thursday. Visibly distraught, he sat at the podium and gave the most well-received postgame presser a Net has had in years.
“I wanted that s*** so f****** bad,” he began.
“Ever since we’ve been here, it’s like every game is an away game, you know? Tonight was just the night to really just stick it to everybody, man. As an organization, as a team, to show people that we got s**** here, yo. Man, just a sea of blue, a sea of orange. Every game we play, it’s a sea of the other team, and I saw it here when I was on the Celtics. But being here, it’s like, I got nothing but respect for the real fans, like, the real Brooklyn fans. Shout out to them, you know, because I know it’s tough being outnumbered every single game. But I really feel like what we have here isn’t b***s***. Like, we have pieces here. I’ve seen it. That’s what this ‘rivalry’ meant to me.”
Yes, Minott put the word “rivalry” in air quotes. After posting the answer on social media, I got dozens of messages and replies just like this, with many fans half-jokingly calling Minott their new favorite player…
Minott did not deny the reality of playing home games at Barclays, particularly for a bad team. He did not try to talk up a rivalry with the team whose fans just infiltrated the building, instead admitting that it stinks. That’s much more palatable than the meek “it is what it is,” type of platitude Mikal Bridges went with when he was still in Brooklyn, and it’s much more respectable than trying to well actually Knicks fans on the Internet.
Minott was brutally honest and defiantly proud to be a Net. That’s an ultra-rare combination, and he pulled it off during a season that might end with 17 wins. In Who Are Nets Fans?, Ock Sportello observed that, “We know that we are alone, then, but only we can say it.”
Well … what if Nets fans didn’t care who said it. One of their own players just did, and it was the most popular quote of the season. The Nets will not tank forever. At some point, they will, in Minott’s words, get a chance to stick it to everybody.
There’s your pride.
