Brooklyn in the Bardo
The Never Hungover 2024-25 Brooklyn Nets Season Preview
The Brooklyn Nets’ 2024 season began not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with a void. On October 8th, a reported 6,190 souls entered a brand new arena to watch the Nets begin their preseason against the Los Angeles Clippers. This arena was not the Intuit Dome, Inglewood’s Ballmerian shrine to mediocrity, but the “Frontwave Arena” in Oceanside, California, the $85 million structure which the G-League San Diego Clippers will shortly call home. For about ten real minutes, and three minutes of game time, these 6,190 were transported with the Clippers and Nets, the NBA’s two crashed and burned little brothers, into a perfectly inaccessible liminal space. The game, due to “broadcast issues,” was not being televised.
For Nets fans, the defining moment of the 2024 season was its first. There are, for the first time in recent memory, not countless ways that the season can go. Rooting for the Brooklyn Nets in 2024 will feel like turning on your television at 10pm, expecting little, and finding nothing. Staring at the silent screen’s “Game Not Televised” notice, I felt as if I were remembering a sensation that I had not yet experienced, but with which I would become terribly familiar over the next year. I, like the Nets, was jolted out of time.
When the game flashed on, I was informed that the Nets fittingly trailed 12-0. Before long, footage of those first three minutes would be passed around like samizdat, fodder for perverse completionists, ambitious film analysts, and uncategorizable sickos. I, I must admit, have seen the footage purporting to be the first three minutes of the Nets season. But this footage is not, in any sense of the word, a true representation of what those depraved enough to tune in from home were could not see. In the video, one sees five straight Clippers baskets, some missed free throws, and a blocked Ben Simmons layups; what those 6,190 attendees saw was the Brooklyn Nets entering the bardo.
The story since the Nets moved to Brooklyn has been a long, continuous death. At times, this death rattle has been interrupted by moments of lucidity profound enough to resemble life: a barrage of Joe Johnson game winners here, a comeback against the Sacramento Kings there, a brief stint with the most talented offensive trio ever assembled for good measure. But throughout it all, the Nets have been living on borrowed time. Through bad stretches and slightly less bad stretches, the organization has undergone something like a slow-motion rendition of Howie Bling’s tragic arc in Uncut Gems: running from inescapable debts, doubling down desperately, hitting big, and catching a bullet in the forehead.
In next year’s ultra-talented draft, the Nets will select and keep a top-20 pick for the first time in 15 years, breaking a stretch of continuously-mortgaged futures that predates their move to Brooklyn. The team has, as I wrote in the spring, finally accepted its fate, acceding to Mikal Bridges’ wish to relive college and facing death with dignity. The Nets, after a decade of failing to accept their circumstances, are finally promised rebirth.
First, though, the Nets must shepherd themselves and their fans through the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist tradition’s liminal, unbounded, and transitional space between death and rebirth. The Brooklyn Nets, for at least the next few years, will only barely exist as such. There will be an alternating group of men who wear jerseys that say “Brooklyn” on them, and on the occasions that they score their points will be credited to the Nets. But the Nets’ position, at the outset of the most long-deferred tank job in the league, renders the entire idea of the 2024-25 Brooklyn Nets as something of an abstraction. Nets fans have never had the opportunity to root for a team for whom losing games was in their interest; my guess is that fans who do this sort of thing look at the very least for glimmers of hope in the crop of players doing the losing, imagining that they will one day be part of a team that delivers upon its promise. By comparison, this year’s Brooklyn Nets roster only one rookie, the Chinese national Yongxi “Jacky” Cui, whose contributions to the Nets future will almost certainly be limited to deep lore, whimsical adventures, and trivial esoterica. Rather than trade into a weak draft, the Nets chose to roster four proven veterans—Dennis Schroder, Dorian Finney-Smith, the homecoming Bojan Bogdanovic, and the premier scapegoat and abandoned twin Cam Johnson—for no discernible reason. Ben Simmons, whose preseason highlights remind one of a great player who remains eternally and inexplicably one week into physical therapy, will likely hobble aimlessly through as many games as he can suit up for. Dariq Whitehead, the former highly-touted McDonald’s All-American, may never play a meaningful game of NBA basketball. Nets fans will have a vested interest in watching the continued developments of Noah Clowney, Jalen Wilson, and the increasingly Carti-esque Nic Claxton; otherwise, tuning into the Nets will entail the fearsomely nihilistic act of watching Cam Thomas shoot forty shots a game and drive people on the internet insane as the team loses games less on purpose than by inescapable structural limitations.
The situation’s not as dire as it sounds. Last year, the Nets were a dreadful team with no horizon. Now, their short-term misery contributes proportionally and measurably toward their future. Nets fans should want their team to lose, and their team looks like it will be good at losing. The question for fans, then, is the extent to which they want to spend their free time shepherding a multi-billion dollar franchise through its liminal afterlife and into rebirth. Fans with an eye for player development would be just as well-off if they occasionally checked friend of the blog Lucas Kaplan’s Twitter for breakdowns. Fans in search of whimsy will, with the limited exception of Jacky Cui’s metropolitan escapades, find only calls for new coach Jordy Fernandez’s firing due to his perceived persecution of martyr Cam Thomas. Fans mining for “remember when?” material would be better served skipping out entirely and browsing Basketball Reference years later.
And yet still, people will watch these Nets, people will cover these Nets, and people will in some meaningful way care about these Nets. Not many, of course—there aren’t many even in the boom years. But there will be some, and their “why,” so to speak, cannot be easily articulated. The Nets have spent nearly all of their time in Brooklyn attempting to astroturf a fanbase, but seasons like the one ahead demonstrate exactly who have been afflicted with the peculiar commitments required to actually call oneself a Nets fan: those dedicated to making meaning out of patent absurdity, those who believe that the joy of eventual victory is multiplied by their voluntary suffering. That there is a light at the end of this tunnel does not diminish its length; this season, and likely the next few, will be about embracing the tunnel’s dank charms and memorizing its features. What I mean, then, is that Nets fans this year will watch games this year less for their own enjoyment than out of a duty to understand what those 6,190 people did at the Frontwave Arena. There are people who are content learning that the Nets are down 12-0, and there are those who need to see everything with their own eyes.