It's Over; or, We Were Eight Games in Power

Brooklyn Nets fans and the indomitable human spirit

“As soon as he has almost reached the summit, he is forced back by the weight of the shameless stone, which bounces to the very bottom once more; where he wearily retrieves it and must begin all over again, though sweat bathes his limbs, and a cloud of dust rises above his head.” - Robert Graves, The Greek Myths

“Clarify: Mavs are sending 2029 first-round pick to the Nets.” - Adrian Wojnarowksi

When the River-god Asopus approached Sisyphus, the Corinthian leader, to learn where Zeus had taken his daughter, Sisyphus saw a business opportunity. He would betray Zeus’s secret so long as he could get something in return, snitching only once Asopus promised to supply the citadel of Corinth with a perennial spring. For this crime, Zeus sent Hades to punish him eternally. Sisyphus, in keeping with the cunning that would prove to be his undoing, thought he could worm his way out of the consequences. He tricked Hades into putting on the handcuffs that had been intended for him, keeping Hades imprisoned in his home for days. When this scheme ran out, he tried another - in the sort of bureaucratic gotcha found only in Greek Myths and courtrooms across America, Sisyphus instructed his wife not to bury him, then argued at the Palace of Hades that he could not meet his punishment without first being buried. Give me three days to arrange a burial on the outside world, he pled to Persephone. When she released him, he bolted, leading once again to Hades haling him into the underworld by force.

Everybody knows what happened to Sisyphus next: for his slipperiness, his betrayal, his belief that he could outsmart the gods, Sisyphus was made an example of. The Judges of the Dead sentenced him to roll a gargantuan block of stone up a hill and over to the other side. To this day, the myth goes, he has never cleared the mountaintop, forced backward at its peak each time by the overpowering weight of his eternal damnation.

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What, one must ask on the day that a second generational superstar in as many years has forced himself out of a Brooklyn Nets uniform, were the crimes of the Nets fan? Was it believing that a trio of mercenary, mercurial max-contract players would turn their astroturfed team into champions? Thinking that you could have a dynasty before a vibrant fanbase? Sincerely expecting that a multi-billion-dollar entertainment product meant predominantly to sell you Kias and State Farm insurance policies could make you feel like a winner?

The Brooklyn Nets experiment ended today, even though it has already ended, even though it is yet to fully end. Nets fandom is about knowing your fate and, like Sisyphus before you, trying to find any way to cheat it. It is seeing the greatest failure in professional sports history unfold every three months and believing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that what could only be seen as eternal damnation could be fixed if Sean Marks would sign a stretch five. Brooklyn Nets fans get to understand what others grapple with only in passing: that fandom is about nothing more than forcing a stone up a hill that cannot be cleared.

It does not matter when one becomes Nets fan. All members of this cursed tribe, from the boomer Hiroo Onadas NetsDaily and Mr. Whammy who have toiled since the franchise’s origins to the late-stage New Jersey faithful, the displaced Brooklynites and transplants, the transient Stans and shitposters, understand this basic truth. Nets fandom is about appreciating a failure as cyclical as it is unforgiving, a failure that is foretold and non-negotiable. Karl Marx, spiritually a Nets fan for his commitment to a world that should but can never truly be born, wrote that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. What comes after farce? Through what vocabulary can you describe the exact cursed history recurring on the dot, year after year, iteration after iteration, the catastrophe intensifying each time like hurricane gusts?

Kyrie Irving is gone now, meaning to much of the fanbase that the original sin of the 2019 to whenever-the-stone-clears-the-hill Nets has been excised. To a degree, they are right. No matter the mental gymnastics of the anti-management Nets faithful to excuse him, Irving has been at the center of nearly every dark chapter of his tenure in Brooklyn, whether his fault or not. Missing games for a vague protest that doubled as an excuse to attend his sister’s birthday party, being taken out by the league’s favorite oversized war criminal to definitively end the Nets’ best chance at a championship run, casting a vaccination-sized shadow over an entire season, posting so much insane shit to Instagram that a Jordan Peterson endorsement doesn’t even make small-print news. Of all the moments over the past few years when Nets fans have sighed and asked why things can’t just go right, Irving’s eccentricities and steadfast commitment to iconoclasm have factored into the overwhelming majority. It’s hard to imagine what fandom looks like without that metatextual sideshow dominating the team narrative. On one hand, it’s not clear to me that Nets fans will know what to do with a team that only makes news for basketball reasons; on the other, it would be foolish to believe that the parade of absurdities ends now.

Many Nets fans are publicly exhaling. That this is likely coping, posturing, or simply intense resentment doesn’t mean that the sentiment is insincere. But any Nets fan claiming to be unequivocally happy that Irving gone is either a liar or a fool. Just as there are no words to adequately describe the sensation of defending or rooting for Irving’s off-court endeavors, so too are there none to describe the unique joy of watching him play basketball. He is often called a magician, which is both woefully imprecise and undeniably on to something. There is not a player in the league who plays with his joy, his creativity, and his artistry. Where rooting for Kevin Durant is to see excellence repeated at a level of precision and consistency that almost renders it second nature, watching Kyrie play basketball is to rediscover what makes the sport so rewarding in the first place. Trying to write about Irving exposes the written word as stale and inadequate - better to hear Ian Eagle call a highlight. “Ky-rie Irving,” he would exclaim, each time as sincere and disbelieving as the first. Nets fans, and league fans at large, were lucky to be able to watch so generative and singular a talent be called by an announcer so enthusiastic, ranged, and playful as Eagle. It is a shame to see the pairing end.

There remains, now, the hardest pairing of all to be ended. That Kevin Durant will be leaving the Nets now seems all but an inevitability. It will be the worst push notification that Nets fans will have received, a real accomplishment for a fanbase defined if nothing else by crushing push notifications. As it stands, Durant will be asked to carry a team of lanky role players to something like decency. Playing along Ben Simmons, the theoretical second star who plays basketball with the same enthusiasm and belief of a pacifist drafted into an unjust war, is a Sisyphean punishment in its own right. Durant is talented enough to make this team anywhere from decent to good, and there is a sense in which it is fitting for the league’s preeminent sigma male to continually grindset an island of misfit role players into playoff exits until the world runs out of water or the Nets get the Dallas Mavericks 2029 first round draft pick. But they will not win a championship, which is what Durant deserves; he will go somewhere where he can.

Leaving what? The Nets again face a future with no picks, no real promising young talent (save the breakout Nic Claxton, who should be traded in any teardown). Instead, they have Ben Simmons. They also have Joe Tsai and Sean Marks, men who deserved credit for turning a laughingstock into a contender and who now, if meritocracy existed, would be banned from entering an NBA arena. Irving’s ego and recalcitrance are now gone, but those of the men running the Nets remain. It is a pity and as dispiriting a concept as a fan could imagine. No matter how dark the coming days get, it will be hard to imagine a brighter future. The Nets exist to fall from grace - how to root for a rebuild when you have just endured one, when it turned into the most potent offensive trio in history, when fans could only attend 8 games of this trio together, when power plays between stars and ownership sent the entire endeavor crashing into the ground? It is easier to convince yourself that a phoenix awaits in ashes when you have not just seen a phoenix shot out of the air.

And yet, if history is any indication, Nets fans will have no choice but to keep torturing themselves - keep believing that another trade awaits, keep talking themselves into defensive-oriented lineups, keep live tweeting Cam Thomas breakout games, keep hoping that things will change. It is easier than coming to terms with the alternative: that a series of petty disputes between a multimillionaire and a multibillionaire destroyed the thing that made your day-to-day lives a bit easier to endure. Perhaps one day the stone will clear the mountaintop, one imagines Sisyphus to think.