Photo by Randy Belice/NBAE via Getty Images
The Barclays Center is the perfect representation of the Brooklyn Nets, and not in the way the franchise hoped.
The Dollar Vans idled at the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic, a long shining line that coursed up and down Brooklyn’s primary arterial Avenue in both directions. The culprit for much of the traffic, just off the Southeast corner, sits the now decade old, rusting, grounded spaceship known as the Barclays Center. It’s catty-corner from an utter failure of foresight and zoning indicative of the entire Brooklyn Nets experience, a Chick-Fil-A and a Shakeshack huddled together on a concrete island between Pacific and 5th, which collectively represents one of- if not the- worst traffic choke points in New York City. An entire lane in front of the two fast food franchises are cordoned off, occupied by a procession of delivery people hailing for every food delivery app, creating a toxic, eternal bottleneck as they wait for their orders, jamming the gypsy cabs, along with trucks, impatient parents ferrying their kids to and from weekend birthday parties and extracurriculars, and commuters trying to get into or out of the borough on an already dark early winter evening.
It’s about 5:30 p.m. on a Sunday in December, and not long from now the Brooklyn Nets, formerly of New Jersey, will play the class of the Eastern Conference, the Boston Celtics, at the home they chose for themselves here in downtown Brooklyn. When you look at the endless caravan, you can almost sympathize with that great monster of city planning, Robert Moses, who once said no to Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley when he wanted to move his baseball team from Ebbets Field to this very site, over a train yard at the Atlantic terminal.
As an alternative for the Dodgers, Moses proposed a remote patch of Earth out in Flushing Queens, where the Mets play now, as far from Brooklyn as you can get but also not an impediment to the city and its flow. This is why the New York Giants and New York Jets play in North Jersey, why the Yankees play in the South Bronx just off the George Washington Bridge, why even the Knicks and Rangers play near Port Authority and the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel on the western edge of midtown. They were strategically placed in locations where they’d do minimal damage to rush hour traffic on bustling game nights. But Barclays is different. It’s a big unavoidable nightmare for anyone trying to move North or South through Brooklyn, located directly in the middle of downtown. It came to the city as a colonizer, an imposing, gentrifying force that expects the city to bend around its whims, like the young parents who move South through Brooklyn, into a lower income community to stretch their dollars, into a building with hundreds of units, where people have lived for generations, and immediately expect their neighbors to adhere to their infant’s nap schedule. The stadium has become a miserable hub, an albatross, and the havoc it wreaks on the borough is a metaphor for the alien presence so on the nose, if it was written, it would have to be stricken by any editor with taste you attempted to submit it to.
The Nets move to Brooklyn mirrored a typical gentrifier’s path to the city. They lived in North Jersey throughout their miserable adolescence, then came here because they thought they could remake themselves in a big city unfamiliar with them, throw on some hip new threads, buy some new friends, and we’d all forget the shitty awkward Jerseyites they once were. And appropriately, that’s the very fanbase the Nets would attract. Back in 2012, the easiest way to tell someone wasn’t from New York was a Nets jersey or hat. And now, despite being here 10 years- much like Matthew McConaughey’s Dazed and Confused character- who kept getting older but chasing the same aged girls- that’s still the case with the Nets. They have the exact fanbase they deserve, composed entirely of Brooklyn LIU freshman, trust fund kids, and former Upper East Side yuppies who go to Nets games to treat themselves to a little guilt free screen time either with or away from their kids, primarily scrolling through their phones during the games and looking up once every 20 minutes in the hopes of catching a t-shirt shot out of a shoulder cannon. I can say with complete conviction and absolute certainty, every single person who wore Nets gear to the game Sunday had owned a Dogecoin at one point.
But there weren’t many of them. The mix of people in the crowd wearing Boston vs. Brooklyn merch was probably something like 70-30, but fans of either team were far outnumbered by what is the main type of person who attends a Brooklyn Nets game: The white men and women who don’t give a fuck about basketball, who just kind of ended up with tickets a friend couldn’t get rid of or their corporate job’s hold onto as a perk to that night’s game, who likely live in nearby Carroll Gardens, Fort Greene, or Park Slope and are there more out of convenient circumstance than desire. They have their tousle haired kids in tow, fresh off soccer practice, they wear nondescript fleeces, puffer vests and jackets, shit that looks generic but episodes of Billions and Succession have taught us are actually much more expensive than the Stock X hypebeast shit the actual fans who have made the game and the evening an event are wearing. They are people who treat the game as an abstract distraction as they blow a few hundred on concessions and souvenirs because the disposable income means nothing to them, a muted movie playing on a TV wedged in a corner at a bar, an activity that works as color in their “What I did as an affluent 40 something on a Sunday in Brooklyn” TikTok POV video.
It’s fitting that a piece attempting to serve as a referendum on the Nets’ Brooklyn years comes the night of a heavyweight tilt against the Boston Celtics. No franchise has played the role of chief antagonist to the Nets, no team more of a funhouse mirror image of the Nets over the last decade than Boston. They have the gleam of old money prestige, the generational fans, the model organization with a history of success the Nets continually try to shortcut their way to. It’s perhaps why, when they moved to Brooklyn, and the team’s GM Billy King had a mandate to win now from its Russian-Israeli petro oligarch/gangster owner Mikhail Prokhorov, King chose Boston as the team to farm talent from. In the Summer of 2013, the Nets traded five years of largely unprotected, unconditional draft capital for the Celtics’ washed core. It was a trade that was as seemingly complex as King looking at Boston, and thinking to himself, “Hey, those guys were good at some point and probably will always be that way” and said yes to every ask put to him by then Celtics GM Danny Ainge.
An incredible amount of s—- has happened in three years. But it can all be understood as an outgrowth of rotten process, a team without moral compass, culture, or core beliefs.
We all know how it turned out. The husk of Pierce was gone after a season, the husk of Garnett had exited by 2015, and the trade is widely regarded as the most lopsided in the history of professional sports. The Nets were one of the worst teams in the league over that period and built the looming dynasty in Boston they were facing Sunday night. Their cornerstones, superstar wings Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, both came courtesy of Nets high lottery picks. And yet, in the smoldering crater of a franchise left by this disastrous trade- that resulted in even the owner bailing on the team- the Nets rebuilt admirably.
New GM Sean Marks acquired draft picks and contracts no one wanted, they found talent on the margins, they excelled at scouting and player development, and built a scrappy, overachieving, lovable team in the late 2010s just as they began controlling their own draft picks again. And we all know what happened. Like Lucy and Charlie Brown, fate delivered an ass kicking again in the corporeal forms of Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving, as weird and mercurial superstars as the league has ever seen, who chose the Nets as their landing place in the free agent summer of 2019, which they claimed to be attracted to for the “culture” Marks and coach Kenny Atkinson had built. It’s a culture they dismantled in a season, as Durant continued to rehab a torn achilles and Kyrie took some time off to study and reflect. Atkinson was fired, and promising young center Jarett Allen was shipped off to make room for a few lackluster months of DeAndre Jordan, James Harden came at the expense of all the remaining assets the team had, there was a once in a century pandemic, Durant was a Karmic toe on the line short of robbing a title from the Bucks, Ben Simmons is on the team now, an incredible amount of shit has happened in three years. But it can all be understood as an outgrowth of rotten process, a team without moral compass, culture, or core beliefs. The team’s construction, and decision making, the lack of dedication to continuity, and organic development, is yet another perfect reflection of how the franchise has approached building a community and a fanbase in Brooklyn.
There are several stupid and meaningless banners that hang from the rafters in Barclays, but the worst one, sitting next to a banner commemorating a few sold out Jay Z concerts, is a nonsensical dedication to Biggie Smalls, the greatest rapper who ever lived, who grew up on St. James Place, a few blocks away from where Barclays would end up, murdered tragically fifteen years before the arena opened. The banner retires Biggie’s “number”, 72, which is the year he was born and was on the back of the iconic custom jersey he wore in “Juicy”, a song about what it meant to him to make it through the bad old days of his Brooklyn childhood. It also quotes the song’s most overworked and misunderstood phrase, “Spread love, it’s the Brooklyn way.”
The banner represents everything that sucks about Barclays. It cynically gloms onto a real history and community with a repugnant, unearned smugness, claiming it as its own. It’s a play the Nets have pulled several times in spectacularly transparent and unsuccessful fashion. Their inaugural City Edition jerseys borrowed from Biggie’s beloved Coogi sweaters, using the designer’s trademark pattern for their trim, which resulted in a lawsuit. These days the jerseys are fashioned in the style of Park Slope native Jean Michelle Basquiat- a master salesman and former graff writer who probably would have been amused by the crass commercialization of his work- but the jerseys are grotesque and corny. It’s even in the food. The concessions in Barclays are mostly farmed out to “local businesses”, essentially licensing deals that allows the stadium to use the brand of establishments like Paisanos, the great butcher shop on Smith Street, that is now somehow a burger vendor in the unvented cubicle it serves out of. It’s the same overpriced, mass produced, corporatized greasy bullshit you can find in most basketball arenas around the country, but sold as handmade and community oriented. Like the Nets.
The actual game against the Celtics was an unpleasant slog. Ben Simmons was out again, and without him, Jaylen Brown and Jason Tatum were able to score, pretty much at will against a team that has more or less punted on the concept of “defense”. The two once potential Nets players combined for 63 points. Durant, now in his 30s, as sleek and automatic a scorer as the league has ever seen, poured in an efficient 31, but did so largely in a vacuum. There is little to no coherence on the floor for the Nets. Sunday night was a game of dueling banjos between Durant and his hotep life mate, and it wasn’t enough. Kyrie Irving, whose latest string of controversies I’ve declined to cover here intentionally, didn’t go to the line much, but when he did, he was booed as loudly as I’ve ever heard a player booed on his home court. It’s unclear if people booing him were Celtics fans who he spurned as he mired the franchise in two miserable seasons before coming to Brooklyn, or people who don’t care for hate speech. Either way, it was the most engaged the crowd was the entire game.
Many fans had headed for the exits before the Nets lost by 11, bringing their record to near .500, which is about where it belongs. They’ve metastasized into a mediocre team with two occasionally brilliant players who somehow combine to play boring and menial basketball. After the final buzzer I melted into the crowd, which was not particularly dejected or bothered by what they had just witnessed, and why would they be? They got exactly what they came here for, a few hours out of the house. We emerged, zombified and blinkered into the December cold, where all around us, people streamed in herds across the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush, and traffic was once again at a standstill, a quagmire with no end in site, stretching for miles in every direction.
