Custody Battle: Nets vs. Pelicans
the season begins. welcome to a hell of our own making.
An essential component of the schizoid NBA fan experience (which, if it isn’t already clear, is the only authentic experience available) is the feeling – no, more, the conviction – that the league schedule is telling you something. There is meaning in this Mickey Mouse affair awaiting your divination and yours alone. And so how could the 2022 season start for your humble servants at Never Hungover if not with the ultimate custody battle for my fandom and soul: the Brooklyn Nets versus the New Orleans Pelicans.
This is not a season preview. That’s been done already. Nor, for that matter, is this a preview of the game to come. I have no thoughts on that worth sharing, and the game itself feels largely insignificant. This is me looking the universe in its eyes, hearing its message, and defiantly responding: No, I cannot choose happiness, for misery is my lot.
Moving is an opportunity to start anew, to rebuild your life from the ground floor. To immerse yourself, if you’re brave enough, in the place and culture around you. And because the Brooklyn Nets make up a significantly shoddy and structurally devastated portion of my life’s ground floor, truly moving would require above all else my abandoning this team. What better way to replace the spectral, doomed Nets than moving to New Orleans, as one does, and becoming a Pelicans fan?
At the nadir of my relationship to the Nets – with the memory of the Boston sweep fresh, amidst widespread calls to free the political prisoner Kevin Durant, in the wake of Royce O’Neale – escaping this organization felt not only likely but inevitable. They had failed in the most spectacular way possible, a failure profound enough to crush not only any immediate hope but also the entire feeling that sports fandom, writ large, could ever deliver you anything of value. I, like the Sniper, was to finally be freed. Ock was done with basketball.
And while of course I knew that I could never truly liberate myself, that my brain was and is irreparably grooved to invest significance into millionaires playing a children’s’ game, I had at least imagined newer, more forgiving contours of my captivity. I thought, to be perfectly honest, that I would become a Pelicans fan. Why not? I was no stranger to rooting for a team with twelve fans. What stopped me from cheering for the likeable, upstart team in the city to which I was moving, engaging with that sort of water-cooler flippancy (“You see Zion? He looks great. I need that workout plan! Ha ha ha . . .” and so on) that bears the psychic weight of the crumbling American empire? Wouldn’t choosing the Pelicans be choosing to really move, to step into my new home? To be, as it were, normal?
My mistake, like Kevin Durant’s, was thinking that I had a choice. I thought, foolishly and with great hubris, that I could control my predestined pathologies. I truly believed that I could opt out. Gigachad Joe Tsai, the World Economic Forum as personified in a billionaire who somehow still believes in the commercial viability of professional lacrosse, had other plans. “You’ll root for Royce O’Neale,” he commanded, “and you’ll be happy.”
And so to prove the point the powers that be scheduled the Nets, the hopelessness to which I have been consigned, to play the Pelicans, the mercy I might have accepted, on the very first night of the season. No matter how electrifying the Pelicans come out, no matter how pathologically Ben Simmons avoids the mere prospect of shooting the basketball, no matter, no matter: my bed has been made. It is not my fate to cheer alongside my neighbors at a bar as Zion Williamson floats effortlessly through the air. It is my Sisyphean duty, instead, to tweet with the Internet strangers to whom I have been choicelessly bound until the Nets sign Mike James.
Stay in line, Joe Tsai commands. A feeble “yes sir” slips from my lips.
Stay in line