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Celebrating the New Jersey Nets

We decided to make yesterday #NJNetsDay on Twitter to appreciate some of the good memories from the old days.

By Anthony Puccio
Jason Kidd - Andrew Bernstein

Ah nostalgia, my old friend. NBA TV featured the Nets on Sunday during their feature called “Team Day”, and showed some of the best games in franchise history.

  • Game 2 Finals victory against the Spurs (The Nets’ first Finals victory in the NBA).
  • Vince Carter’s famous 46-point triple-double game against the Wizards, the first time in 17 years that two teammates, he and Jason Kidd, had triple doubles in the same game.
  • Game 5 of the 2002 playoffs: An elimination game against the Indiana Pacers when Reggie Miller hit a near halfcourt shot to send it to overtime. The Nets ultimately prevailed, 120-109.
  • The Nets last championship, led by Dr. Julius Erving and the New York Nets at Nassau Coliseum.

It was a nice trip down memory lane for those who have been following the Nets for more than the six seasons they’ve been in Brooklyn. So, since there aren’t many days to celebrate the Nets history both in New York and New Jersey, we decided to start a movement called #NJNetsDay on Twitter.

Here were just a few of the responses:

T.J. Kidd, Jason Kidd’s first son...

Longtime fans...

Some friends from overseas...

***

Their banners hanging in the rafters may be black and white, not red, white and blue ... which is wrong, wrong, wrong. They don’t have a jersey that says “NETS” on the front. And, until recently, they hardly celebrated the history of their best player Jason Kidd and the team he brought to the Finals two consecutive years after joining a 26-win season.

New Jersey seems so long ago, yet it wasn’t. Games didn’t sell out, including Finals games. Merchandise was bottom-five in the NBA almost every year leading up to Brooklyn. Jason Kidd quite literally pulled a power play and tried to become GM of the team after one year of coaching, finding his way to Milwaukee not long after in what was an ugly breakup between the two sides.

There ARE reasons why things are the way they are.

That said, they might be in Brooklyn now and it’s ALL about Brooklyn, which is fine, but I think everybody from Brooklyn would agree: You never forget where you came from.

(Fill the red with black or white and switch “NEW JERSEY” to “NETS” in the old font. Wouldn’t that be pretty cool?)

There are some indications of a slight change. The Nets will celebrate Kidd’s —and Rod Thorn’s— enshrinement in the Basketball Hall of Fame next month and word is that “legacy” is no longer a dirty word in marketing the team. And maybe it’s time for Mikhail Prokhorov to apologize for that ill-worded message he had for Kidd in 2014. It’s time for memory to be restored.

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