So Serious: Writer anguishes over Knicks vs. Nets

Even we here at NetsDaily know Nets vs. Knicks isn't a morality play. It's about basketball. But writer Jon Kelly seems to think it's bigger than that. He exhausts nearly 2,000 words this Sunday in the New York Times, wrestling with whether he should end his monogamous relationship with the Knicks and join up with the Brooklyn brigade.

No, he concludes, he just can't do it. The Nets are not "authentic," too tinged with Kardashianism and weird architecture and Russian five-year plans and most of all with Brooklyn's suffocating self-love, which he decides is more "Brooklynland" than Brooklyn. The Knicks, he writes (at length) may be about heartbreak and pain, but it's at least real heartbreak, real pain.

The crucial difference is that while the Knicks might be unpredictable and occasionally detestable, they are at least authentically so. The Nets, in all their carpetbagger glory, are the exact opposite. They are a team of pricey stars and Kardashian exes that hasn’t had a winning season since 2006, trying to fool fans, with big salaries and cool new uniforms, into thinking they’re getting a different product than the one that bombed in Jersey.

The bottom line he writes while "mulling" the scene at the Wizards preseason game: "The borough may have been rooting for the Nets that night, but it was really cheering for itself. And the Nets, a vagabond team with an unspectacular history, deserved that applause. I just couldn’t be a part of it." Good God.

• The Nets and Brooklyn Deserve Each Other - Jon Kelly - New York Times