Though I live in a swamp now, I feel a chill cut the air. Fall is here. The aggregators are in bloom, the reporters swarming. It is, against all odds, Nets media day again.
For the first time in a long time, I’m finding myself unable to care about the upcoming Brooklyn Nets season. I do not expect watching or following the team to be fun, rewarding, or in any way worthwhile. I do not, in a real and felt sense, “care.” And yet, at the same time, I find myself as mesmerized by the cast of characters which this season presents than I ever could have imagined given my absolute, perfect knowledge of the failure to come. My gaze is trained not with expectation, but with the grim, human instinct forces one to stare at a car crash.
The Brooklyn Nets experiment failed, and will continue to fail, tremendously. They did more than squander potentially the most talented trio ever assembled: they did it in an utterly deflating, humiliating, and fundamentally unbelievable way than even the most cynical naysayer might have predicted. Untimely injuries turned into a season derailed by a pandemic, ashy ankles, and James Harden’s nightclub addiction; turned into an embarrassment of a sweep at the hands of the Boston Celtics; turned into the most visible and high-profile trade request from a franchise cornerstone in league history; turned, at the end of the day, into nothing more than Royce O’Neale. Hope has no home here.
Nets media day, then, is a stark reminder that, against all odds, we are doing this again. The Nets march with the cadence of a patient equipped with a terminal diagnosis into a season for which it would be impossible to harbor even secret ambitions. And yet – and yet – take a moment to assess the team on paper. Suspend your disbelief and think about it for a second. A physically and mentally healthy Ben Simmons adding defensive prowess and basketball IQ. An engaged and present Kyrie Irving, finally able to play with some semblance of consistency. Kevin Durant. A widely-quoted idiot defined insanity as doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Whom among us might not the Brooklyn Nets drive insane?
It’s impossible not to think of the 2020 Democratic midterms – the knowledge that we are destined to lose, the irrational hope that we might just win, and the unshakeable, depressing knowledge that we have been here before. This, more than anything, is why I will tune into the Brooklyn Nets this year. As an atrocity exhibition, as an exercise in self-denial, as a reminder that there is no escape. That what you want cannot and will not happen, that your choice to the extent you have one is limited exclusively to whether or not you will tune in.
I used to watch the Nets on the premise that sports, like any form of high-level entertainment, might let you transcend the limitations of your life. On the promise, in other words, of feeling something bigger. I know better now than to indulge such foolishness. This year there will be no celebrating, but there will be no crying either. But, if history is any precedent, there will at least be laughing. Tune in.