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Just after the final bell rang in Game 7 between the Milwaukee Bucks and Nets during the NBA Eastern Conference semifinals last spring, Giovannie Cruz Elizabeth was forced to leave her home in Elizabeth, NJ and go to a nearby park. A Nets fan of 39 years, Cruz watched the game with his 4-year-old son and “acted like crazy” until the end, when the Nets lost heartbreakingly.
“I literally walked around that park for almost an hour out of frustration,” Cruz said. “I didn’t want my son to see me too active and use too much colorful language.”
It was supposed to be last season NS The season when the Nets and their fans—both long-suffering and newcomers alike—would no longer be an afterthought in the NBA, Jackie Robinson was wearing a suit the last time a professional sports team from Brooklyn won a championship. Uniform for Dodgers In Major League Baseball. It was 1955.
But more was at stake for the Nets last season than just winning a championship. In a city dominated by Knicks fans, a championship could allow the Nets to plant a basketball-shaped flag (and a banner) in their effort to shift the balance of power away from Madison Square Garden and put Knicks fans in their place. Ask the mayor of New York, one of the Nets’ most prominent supporters.
“I feel this is the final act of Brooklyn’s renaissance and giving Brooklyn its rightful place in the world, and it’s crucial to the city’s progress,” said long-time Brooklyn resident Bill de Blasio before its 2014 opening. said in an interview before Game 3 of the semi-final series, where the Nets were leading 2-0 and a title race seemed inevitable.
The Renaissance will have to wait. This summer, the Nets renewed their roster and somehow managed to add flair to one of the best paper assemblies in NBA history. Expectations will be high for the Nets as veteran players like Patty Mills and Paul Millsap come off the bench and healthy versions of Kevin Durant and James Harden are ready to hit the pitch. That’s true even if Kyrie Irving, who was banned from matches until he was vaccinated, hasn’t played for a while. But if the Nets don’t get at least one ring, this period will likely be considered one of the biggest flops ever, and the Nets will miss their best chance to break the suddenly revived Knicks’ hold on the city.
“We don’t just want to be the most popular NBA team in New York City,” Nets CEO John Abbamondi told Barclays before Game 7. “We want to be a global sports icon. Barcelona is at the level of Real Madrid. That’s our desire.”
Nine years ago, the Nets played their first season in Brooklyn. After being in New Jersey since 1977 Following the merger with the ABA, the team had some success with the fast-paced teams of Jason Kidd, Richard Jefferson, and Kenyon Martin in the early 2000s, but spent most of its history in the wilderness of basketball, rarely luring stars or playing in key games. games.
“It was a little tough back then,” said guard Trenton Hassell, who ended his New Jersey Nets career from 2008 to 2010. “We still had real fans, but we were losing a lot. It was hard.”
Moving to Brooklyn was a fresh start on many levels. They had a shiny new arena, a new brand, and a prominent minority owner in the often sidelined Jay-Z with his megastar wife, Beyoncé.
Nets fans old and new blend and form a new collective identity. The cheers at the Barclays Center usually stand out from the 96 or so fans sitting in Section 114. The challengers there, called the Brooklyn Brigades, are supported by the team and are known for their creative cheers. This means that rival fans are often the Nets and Barclays participation was moderate comprehensive.
Richard Bearak has been a Nets fan since the 1970s and was in the championship in 1976. He’s the land use director for Brooklyn borough president and Democrat’s New York City mayoral candidate, Eric Adams. Bearak said that when Barclays first opened to the public, the arena was a “tourist attraction” that attracted fans of winning and opposing teams.
“A third of the crowd could have supported Golden State,” said Bearak, 63. “It’s really hard to be a fan of another team at Madison Square Garden and expect to be there in crowds.”
When the Nets first arrived from Meadlowands in 2012, they did so as a mediator, according to some. First, there were fans in New Jersey who were upset about losing their team. And in Brooklyn, there were those who believed Barclays would, as part of a $6 billion commercial and residential redevelopment. more harm than good to the region – especially with concerns about gentrification and congestion.
A 2014 survey by The New York Times Facebook data showed that after two seasons in Brooklyn, the Knicks were the more popular team in every New York City zip code except for the neighborhoods surrounding the Barclays, partly due to new residents moving to the rebuilt downtown. In response, Village Voice told the Nets, “Gentrification Team”
“We didn’t have a fan base for New York or Brooklyn,” said Irina Pavlova, then a senior manager at the company of the team’s owner, Mikhail Prokhorov. “It was zero. It was starting from scratch, especially in a city like New York where the Knicks are such an institution.”
Pavlova said the franchise is focused on using “Brooklyn” as its main calling card to gain new fans instead of the team name as other franchises do. The fruits of this marketing effort are the long “Broooooklyn!” of the most common team cheer. it can still be seen today.
“This was done to appeal to the residents of the district as they did not have a team to support,” Pavlova said.
People cheering for the Nets these days can usually be placed in four boxes. 1. The Nets have been fans since they were in the ABA and plays on Long IslandLike Bearak. 2. New Jersey era fans like Cruz. 3. New fans of the Brooklyn era. 4. Those who support certain stars, regardless of their team.
This last group may be the most difficult to track and most important to the future of the Nets in the NBA, where star players are more influential than any other team sport. Irving, Durant and Harden brought in an unspecified number of temporary fans. The A-list trio in the first and second half of last season, three of the league’s top 10 best-selling jerseys.
Dawn Risueno, 53, who has lived in Brooklyn all her life, became a Nets fan in 1990 after her ex-boyfriend preferred them to the Knicks.
He spent several years following the team around the country as part of an annual journey. She turned her sports-agnostic husband of 18 years into the cause and brought up her two children and seven grandchildren.
“They didn’t have any other options in that regard,” Risueno said of his children and grandchildren. “I’ve literally had them in Nets outfits since they came out of the womb.”
Portfolio manager Bobby Edemeka, 46, born and raised in Brooklyn, said he follows players rather than teams. But the Nets’ relocation to his hometown gave him pride, and Edemeka formed the unofficial Brooklyn Brigades group until the Nets began sponsoring them in 2018. (Edemeka would buy bundles of tickets and give them free to prospective Nets fans.)
“You can travel all over the world and you won’t find people who are more proud of where they come from than New Yorkers, and I think that’s especially true for those from Brooklyn,” Edemeka said.
For pre-Brooklyn fans like Cruz, loving the team means “always waiting for the bottom to drop.” Cruz had the 2009-10 season where the team went 12-70. Still, Cruz was upset that the Nets left New Jersey after two years. Still, he continued to root for the team. There weren’t many New Jerseyans.
For new fans like Edemeka, Nets memories are mostly the highlights. The team has made the playoffs in six of its nine seasons with Barclays. there were two playoff series wins. All things considered, there really wasn’t much suffering.
“I don’t have any of that emotional charge,” said Edemeka, who has season tickets for all seasons of the Nets. “I didn’t live 12 and 70. I got rid of the burden of this legacy.”
All but the old Nets fans and the newest Knicks fans know a thing or two about emotional baggage. Yet the Nets’ relative success in Brooklyn didn’t break the city’s commitment to the Knicks, alongside the mostly bleak days at Madison Square Garden during the same period.
In theory, there is a concrete way to bridge this gap. Fans go further to associate themselves with winners. Groundbreaking study of fan behavior by Robert B. Cialdini in 1976 — a psychological concept known as “enjoying the reflected splendor”. The opposite – leaving the losing teams – is known as “cutting reflected failure”. The study found that fans probably said “we”, referring to their favorite team winning, and “they” if the team lost.
Rick Burton, professor of sports management at Syracuse University, said that if the Knicks remained a more incompetent team, it could accelerate a cultural shift that the younger generations in the city have yet to tap into their team allegiance.
“The Knicks could have ruled almost by default,” Burton said of the Knicks before 2012. “But with social media, 500 TV channels, a million websites, Brooklyn isn’t that far from any of the other boroughs, all of a sudden we need to talk about it. The fact that the Nets have a lot more reputation than the Knicks.”
But the other side of it is, of course, not winning, which the Nets are intimately familiar with. Last season’s promising but ultimately fading semi-final series showed that.
“Being a Nets fan has always been very difficult,” Cruz said.
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