Nuts Crooklyn

How I fell out of love with the Brooklyn Nets

One of the little rules that I try to live by is that I never post anything negative on social media — the world already has enough negativity in it and I don’t want to feed the online outrage machine if I can avoid it.

I’m choosing to make a rare exception to my policy today. My topic is the Brooklyn Nets.

The Nets moved to Brooklyn in 2012 — the borough’s first major American professional sports team since the departure of the Dodgers in the 1950s. I greeted their arrival at the Barclays Center with no small amount of excitement. I have been a basketball fan for as long as I can remember — one of my earliest memories as a kid is writing a book about Bill Russell — and I felt a measure of civic pride when the Nets came to town. The icing on the cake was Jay-Z’s involvement with the team as a co-owner (since ended). Jay-Z allegedly helped select the Nets’ starkly beautiful black and white logo, a rare example of restraint in the generally garish world of sports marketing.

I bought the gear. And I went to the games — for the first six or seven years after the Nets arrived, I would go to maybe 4-5 games each season. It was exciting to see professional basketball in Brooklyn. The team wasn’t great, but I could get behind strivers like Reggie Evans, Joe Harris and Jarrett Allen — unheralded players who made the most of whatever talent they possessed. The atmosphere at the games wasn’t the best, but there were some signs of a hometown fan culture emerging, including the dance stylings of Jeffrey Gamblero (RIP) and the “free throw defense” of Mr. Whammy.

But, as the years went on, my enthusiasm for the Nets gradually began to curdle. It pretty quickly became clear that New York was fundamentally a Knicks town and that even die-hard Brooklynites preferred Manhattan’s team to their own. Not just the Knicks but the Heat, Warriors, Celtics and Lakers always seemed to have more fans at the Barclays Center than the Nets did. As if to distract attention from their tepid fan support, the Nets made attending games an assaultive experience, playing loud music constantly and filling every pause in the action with frenzied activity. God forbid that you should want to talk with the people around you — conversation at the Barclays Center was all but impossible given the din.

On the court, the team has had a track record of unrelenting mediocrity, interrupted by two false dawns. The first was when the Nets traded for Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in 2013, an all-in deal that effectively mortgaged the team’s future for one season’s worth of effort from two fast-fading stars. That iteration of the Nets was disappointing, but the players were professional and played hard — two descriptions that could not always be applied to the Kyrie Irving, Kevin Durant and James Harden super team that came to town in 2020. The Kyrie-KD-Harden partnership evaporated nearly as quickly as it was assembled, dissipating in a mist of acrimony, Covid controversy, trade demands, work stoppages (a Kyrie speciality), and accusations of antisemitism. That particular collection of players, and the way they exited, left a bad taste. I have not been back to see the Nets since.

Off the court, the Nets have been mostly horrible neighbors. The Barclays arena occupies a long stretch of Flatbush Avenue, one of Brooklyn’s largest and most important streets. In the early years of the team, it looked like the arena was going to make some effort to activate the block between Dean Street and Atlantic Avenue, with a box office, team store and other retail spaces facing the street.

Whatever aspirations the arena once had for Flatbush Avenue have evaporated. Instead of attempting to welcome the public into the space, the building has effectively turned its back to the street — in place of active storefronts, pedestrians are now greeted by a long row of impenetrable glass.

Worse still, the arena has also sabotaged one of most important public amenities that the Barclays Center brought with it: the large entrance plaza in front of the building, which ideally serves as a bridge between Park Slope and Fort Greene. Instead of a beautiful open space underneath the building’s distinctive “oculus,” on many days access to the plaza is obstructed by police barriers, creating annoying and unnecessary obstacles for pedestrians. The photo below, taken from the Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park Report, isn’t even a particularly egregious example.

I write all of this more in sadness than in anger. I was once a fan of the Nets. I would love to be one again some day.