2019 NBA playoffs: Nets Fandom is in New York

Inside a pub in the Pacific Park neighborhood of downtown Brooklyn, in a spot with flawless floors and tulip-framed glasses of Delirium's pink elephants, a group of three-year-olds from Toronto. men dressed in black and white is sitting in front of a variety of beer taps. There is a massive head of moose taxidermied mounted on a wall; Framed sports memorabilia is bolted to another. It's calm. There are only seven tables in the room, five of which are empty. The televisions on the wall show Joel Embiid, not smiling, preparing for the second game of the playoff series of the first round between the Brooklyn Nets and Philadelphia 76ers, which should begin in about 30 minutes.

The prognosis is at 8 pm, and as the minutes pass, the fans continue to sink. The morale at the bar is skyrocketing: just two days ago, the Nets – no. No. 6 seeds in the East, a team that did not win any playoff bets until the final weekend of the regular season, flew 111-102 victories on the road against the mighty Sixers in post-race. Brooklyn was recently the laughingstock of the NBA; now he has a way to go to pass the second round. "I want to go to Philadelphia for the fifth game," said one of the men. "But I can not, because we will sweep."

By the time the Sixers forward Jimmy Butler scores the first points of the match, there are no more open tables, although there is plenty of room to move. It's not hot, but it's noisy. In the first quarter, nearly 160 kilometers from the Wells Fargo Center, fans here sing for the defense. They call Ben Simmons a tramp. DeMarre Carroll strikes three points back to back to open the net and screams a ricochet on the walls. A guy wearing a Jahlil Okafor jersey is asking me why I do not applaud him. I tell him I'm not a fan of the Nets. "As fans of Nets, we can not compare our doggedness," he replies. "There are not enough of us for that."

The Nets are part of this season's NBA wellness stories. In the fall, the optimism was such that they could qualify for the playoffs in a weak Eastern Conference, but not much, given their record of 28-54 in 2017-18 . And yet they finished 42-40 and saw goalkeeper D'Angelo Russell turn into All-Star. They took advantage of shot at goal by three-point champion Joe Harris. They rebounded after unlikely deficits, such as a quarter-point 25-point breakthrough to overthrow the Kings in March. They gained national fame for their youth and fun, and the hype surrounding them culminated after an inaugural victory against the Sixers. Yet, they also pose a local conundrum: how many New Yorkers encourage this team? How much does Brooklyn care about the surprising emergence of the Nets?

The pub scene provides at least a partial answer. Most of those in the room are members of the Brooklyn Brigade, a football-style support group that sits at Barclays Center section 114 for every Nets home game. The Brigade, or what would become the Brigade, met for the first time in November 2012, as Bobby Edemeka did not know where to find other Nets fans.

Edemeka, the group's president, did not motivate the Nets until the franchise announced his transfer from New Jersey to the borough after the 2011-12 season. When Edemeka heard that his team was going to get to the corner of the street where he grew up, he got season tickets, started trekking in Newark to play games and has become a regular of Daily fillets, the affiliate site of Nets' SB Nation.

In the fall of 2012, the Nets moved into Barclays Center, a mother ship with green roofs and wood and glass paneling on Atlantic Avenue. The presentation was impeccable. going to a net game looked like a visit to the future. Fans enter the arena under a giant, halo-like monitor, pass through glass doors and ticket counters, and head to a place that makes them feel like you're swallowing. But during the inaugural Nets season, the new arena could not distract visitors from a number of issues, including the fact that the games seemed barren. If there was a passionate fan base of Nets, no one could hear it.

So Edemeka started an experiment: he posted in a Daily fillets commentary section that he would have bought 20 extra tickets for an early season game and that he wanted 20 intrepid Nets to join him. Many users thought it was a complex scam, but 20 people showed up. "There was no dominant geography, you had Long Island, you had Queens," says Edemeka. "I would say more than geography, if they were fans of Mets or Jets, they happened to be fans of Nets."

Edemeka repeated the process two or three more times during the 2012-13 season. He reviewed the section for fans who brought the most energy to the games and invited them to come back. At the end of this season, the group had given its name. By the end of 2013-14, the Nets had created a permanent place for the brigade in section 114.

The lean years that followed may have weakened the ranks of Nets fans, but given the noise in the pub during the first half of Monday's second game, it does not seem to have diminished. enthusiasm of the most dedicated part of the base. The Nets stick with Philly during the first two quarters and head for the break, led by one. "Rihanna did not want you!" Shouts a fan to Embiid through the screen as the teams make their way through the tunnels.

Then the third quarter begins. The Sixers are starting to score as they wish. Embiid gets what he wants in the post. Simmons hits the hoop without opposition. Boban Marjanovic can not miss the mid-range; Russell, meanwhile, loses contact with his ice cubes when he raises them over Boban's outstretched arms. At the end of the period, the Sixers scored 51 points, the highest number of ties tied in the quarter-finals in the NBA. The Philly advance has climbed to 29 in what will end in a rout of 145-123. A member of the brigade puts his arm around me.

"Real fans," he said, "stay and take their fools."

When the Nets left New Jersey, their departure was not grueling. There was no jockey at the state chamber of commerce; no proxy wars by opportunistic businessmen, such as the departure of the Seattle Sonics in 2008. Even fans of the Nets, or what they had left, did not seem particularly upset by this development.

The last years of the team in Jersey have been terrible. In the last three seasons of the Nets before the move, they have won a victory. combined 58 games and brewed by four different head coaches. Kris Humphries was the leader of the final season of the jersey. During those three seasons, they were defeated at home games against Izod Center in East Rutherford and Prudential Center in Newark, fighting for both places. One of the promotions was designed to attract players to the games: reversible jerseys consisting of a Nets player on one side and an opposing star on the other. "They would have a jersey that, like, would [Courtney Lee] on one side and Kobe on the other, "says Devin Kharpertian, who covered the Nets for ESPN's TrueHoop network and YES during the team's move and his early years in Brooklyn. I have checked; a double jersey LeBron James and Jarvis Hayes really existed.

Part of the problem was that the Nets have never established a strong connection with any part of the region. Since the creation of the team as New Jersey Americans by ABA in 1967, the team has never managed to stay in place. After his first season, he settles on Long Island, takes the name of New York Nets and plays in the tiny Long Island Arena, with a capacity of 6,500 seats. A year later, he moved into the even smaller garden of Island Garden, and three years later he moved to the largest Nassau Coliseum, a beloved arena where the NHL Islanders always found their biggest crowds. The Nets were still in a pre-fusion world, far from the city center and almost never on television, when a young electric talent named Julius Erving led them to two ABA titles.

The success did not last. The NBA-ABA merger took place in 1976, instantly changing the trajectory of the Nets. "When they merged into the NBA, they had to pay millions of dollars to the NBA, just like other ABA franchises," says Frank Guridy, professor of sport and urban history at Columbia University. . "They had to sell Julius Erving to the Philadelphia 76ers, and then they moved to the suburbs of New Jersey. … And in New Jersey, they play in the Meadowlands, which is virtually nowhere else, in a nearby arena of the Giants Stadium and where there is no fan base. "

In the blink of an eye, no matter how much the Nets generated, the folklore that might have existed on Long Island was gone. It's possible to imagine the Nets with the Islanders fan base, an adorable and racy group built in the boroughs and suburbs. Instead, they had to start over. "East Rutherford is not a place," says Guridy. "It's not even a city."

The Nets struggled to attract audiences during their early decades in East Rutherford. In their first 25 seasons in the NBA, they only managed once in the first round of the playoffs. In the early 2000s, teams led by Jason Kidd went into the final twice in a row, before falling into the trap of the Shaq-Kobe Lakers, then Spurs Robinson-Duncan. In 2004, the team exchanged for high-flying Vince Carter to expand the window of titles but never managed to qualify for the conference final.

In 2009, the team began to give in and give up the fan base it had established closer to the franchise. When the Nets abandoned their fans, they largely abandoned the Nets. "The words" New Jersey "come from team uniforms and you will not find them anywhere in the arena.Even the abbreviation is gone: if you watch a Nets game on TV – and s you do not really do it – the score will be something like "DALLAS 110, NETS 82" ", wrote David Roth The punch in 2010. "The relationship between the people of New Jersey and the idea of ​​being Jersey is a complicated thing, but suffice it to say that most of the state's citizens would consider this as a pretty cocky cock movement. "

"It was the end of a time everyone was ready for," says Kharpertian. "I think of that alongside the Sacramento Kings, where they had the chance to move to Seattle and where this huge horde of fans gathered to make a documentary and a protest, and there was this huge uprising to keep the Kings in Sacramento. There was nothing like it in New Jersey. As nothing. Nobody wanted them to stay.

It is possible that no one in New York wants the Nets either. If you live in or around the city, you have probably heard: There has always been a basketball team in New York and he is about to recruit Kevin Durant and Zion Williamson. Maybe Kyrie Irving too.

The Knicks have been here all the time. Their origins date back to the 1940s, so long ago that their playoff results can be listed in terms such as "Eliminated in Eastern Division Round Robin". Since their inception, they have played in the same arena, Madison Square Garden, the most famous venue in sports. The events took on a mythical meaning: Willis Reed suffered a thigh injury in the seventh game of the 1970 final where Larry Johnson played against Alonzo Mourning in 1997. When Charles Oakley was kicked out of the MSG after an altercation with security guards in 2017, there has been a momentum of local support for the former great man of the team. When Patrick Ewing was not interviewed for the vacant head coach position in 2018, some Knicks fans expressed resentment: He is one of us. Why would not you at least call him?

"I'm working on a book about 90's teams, and people my age and older still have a love story with them, because they represented what many people saw in New York," says Chris. Herring, writer Five Thirty Eight who was on the Knicks beat at the the Wall Street newspaper from 2012 to 2016. "It's a tough city where people work hard and it may not be the prettiest, but you always find a way to get things done."

New York has always expressed its vision of how she sees herself, and one of the things she sees as a basketball city. Knicks teams from the 1970s, '80s and' 90s were generally in keeping with the image of the city, but those days are gone. Ewing does not train the Knicks, but Georgetown. Oakley's relationship with franchise is icy. The team has rarely played in the playoffs in the past 20 seasons and has not made much progress. Ticket prices are high and the games are largely populated by crowds of businesses and fans from outside. The owner of the team, James Dolan, is insulted. He blocks fans who tell him to sell the team to MSG, and responds to angry fans' mail by calling those alcoholic fans and telling them to attack the Nets.

Over the last 20 years, the Knicks have been a team of overnight disasters and chess, aimed at mortgaging the future to bring in a superstar, and then reselling a superstar for visions of the future. Yet they are undeniably the owners of the city. "I think at a certain level [Knicks fans] to somehow deflect the idea that the team must be good to love them, "says Herring. "I think sometimes you like people who, when you think about the way they've treated you, maybe you should not love them as much as you do, and I think that's one of them." little the same to describe a lot of Knick fans. . "

Originally, the Nets had adopted a similar strategy, parachuting to Brooklyn and trying to fly the city to the Knicks with flash. They had the new arena, the new colors and the new brand, as well as Jay-Z sitting next to the field. In 2013, they raised the stakes by sending three first-round picks to the Celtics under a contract involving the acquisition of veteran stars Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett and Jason Terry. This short-sighted trade would handicap the franchise for years to come, but now it's finally settled and reset.

This is no longer one of New York's fast-paced basketball enrichment programs. As a result of this trade, with no predictable route to rapid reconstruction, the Nets have developed a long-term plan. They hired Sean Marks, a young executive who previously held a management position in the Spurs front office, to become their managing director. They called on Kenny Atkinson, a forward-thinking and very energetic Hawks assistant, to be their head coach. The two spent three seasons and helped the team out of the abyss. Perhaps more importantly, they gave this franchise a sense of comfort and continuity that had been lacking for a long time. They gave an identity to the Nets.

"Personally, I feel more attachment to this iteration of the Brooklyn nets than to any other iteration during their seven seasons in Brooklyn," says Edemeka. "There is this sentence that you may have heard:" In Marks We Trust ". I think it's real, unlike in the past where things seemed a bit sloppy and hip-fetched. Now you can say that the reception has a plan. "

The plan began to bear fruit and paved the way for the Nets to become anti-Knicks. Everyone around basketball in New York – Knicks fans, Nets fans, journalists, etc. – echoes similar sentiments by speculating on Brooklyn's climbing potential. Signing a superstar would be good, but building something strong and durable – that's what the Knicks are not – is what could really set the Nets as a draw in New York. "If the Nets are actually engaged, as opposed to putting everything on a star player, that's the difference," Herring said. "The Knicks, whether they admit it or not, have always looked for a savior. Go get Carmelo, bring Phil Jackson, pick up LeBron. And now it will be Durant and Kyrie. … Setting the culture is important.

The Nets had been good before, but they have never done more than a few good seasons, and they have never done it in a place where they have developed a lasting bond with their community. That seems to be the goal now: The Nets' move "to be part of the fabric of the borough was to start at the grassroots level in Brooklyn neighborhoods," said Mandy Gutmann, vice president of communications for the district. 'team. an e-mail mentioning efforts such as those that took place when the Nets company partnered with the New York Food Bank to provide food to federal officials during the government's closure in January.

The mission of the Knicks this summer is to become an immediate competitor. The mission of the Nets is to stay the course, by encouraging more players such as Caris LeVert and Spencer Dinwiddie to join the fans. Although they still have a long way to go – in spite of all its new advances, Brooklyn ranks last last in the NBA in number of spectators in average number of spectators this season – the team finally has a feeling of hope. "I think it's different here in Brooklyn," says Ian Begley, who has been covering the Knicks for ESPN.com since 2010. "You have a different stamp with New York sports fans."

New York will always be, without a doubt, a city of the Knicks. But if Brooklyn continues its upward trajectory, the popularity of the Nets will not always seem so rare. Even if the team that escapes the first round still feels like a long shot, the fact that the plan exists exists is a sign that the franchise may have found its place and a way in a city who already has a reputable team. "Growing up, you would see these commercials with blind tasting tests of different types of peanut butter, where they would cover the label and ask someone what a peanut butter taste is better, "says Edemeka. "I feel like you've created an NBA version of this movie and removed the labels of the respective teams in New York – if you covered the Knicks label and if you covered the Nets label – obviously, I'm biased, but I think the Nets would score better than the Knicks on virtually all metrics. "

Back at the pub, it's getting late. The Sixers starters are all on the bench. The brigade still applauds each bucket, but its enthusiasm decreases. The fans come from all over the city. One of them works at Coney Island and has to leave the house at 4:30 in the morning. The next day begins to arrive. They talk about Thursday and the third match. Everything will be alright. We have the yard at home now. We did what we had to do.

Finally, they shake hands and say goodbye. Outside, the temperature has dropped. It's cold and windy. The Barclays Center shines in the center of everything. Above, the sky is black with white dots.