My Own Barclays Center Fascist Humiliation Ritual

The 2025-26 Never Hungover Brooklyn Nets season preview; or, how and whether to keep loving a team that hates your guts

I don’t want a woman that acts like a dude…I don’t want to say the word submissive because that gets a bad connotation, but like, a woman that acts like a woman - Michael Porter Jr.

The consenus? F*** you and the consensus @ZachLowe_NBA - Cam Thomas

And he has an outstanding feel for the game: think of an Israeli version of D’Angelo Russell - Jonathan Givony

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi chi’intrate - Dante Alighieri

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A funny thing about time: no matter what you do, it keeps churning. You cannot forestall the inevitable. Tomorrow morning, the Brooklyn Nets begin their 2025 season against the Phoenix Suns as part of the NBA’s preseason China Games. The NBA’s decision to send Phoenix and Brooklyn, two hapless teams forever entwined by Kevin Durant Twitter crashouts and lamentably hands-on owners, feels like a further escalation in the United States’ trade war against China.

This year’s Nets, like last year’s, will not be a competitive basketball team. For Nets fans, on-court mediocrity is nothing new—moreover, this year’s misfortune will, ostensibly redound to the team’s long-term benefit. For the second time in as many years, Brooklyn controls the rights to its own draft pick, meaning Nets fans can once again daydream about the Boozer nepo baby or the Mormon kid from Massachusetts or the other one at Kansas. And yet, despite the relative novelty of Brooklyn being in a position to be rewarded for their on-court failures after their decade in the league’s cuck chair, it feels harder than ever to be optimistic about the future of the Nets.

Last year, after the Nets paid an extortionate fee to the Houston Rockets to regain control of their draft picks, the organization appeared to do everything in its power to squander the limited opportunity they had to jostle for a strong draft position. Between Dennis Schröder’s sinister All Star campaign, Nic Claxton heroball against the sinister Philadelphia 76ers, D’Angelo Russell doing the indie sleaze revival schtick for the 2019 season, and Cam Johnson tryhardism, last season’s abortive tank job was dead before it even began. Combine that with the NBA deep state’s coup at the draft lottery—I know it was a long time ago, but still, are you fucking kidding me?—and before you know it the Brooklyn Nets were picking eighth, just two spots ahead of the Suns pick that they’d just offloaded at a BOGO clip. The few Nets fans that remain would be wise to temper their expectations regarding the likelihood of this upcoming season delivering a top pick in the draft; Jordi Fernandez runs this McDonald’s like the Navy.

Worse yet, of course, was what the Brooklyn brass made of their lemons. I watched the first hour of Draft Night on a bar television on the far side of a Tex-Mex restaurant; when I saw the tall Russian kid in the oversized suit stand up at the eighth pick, my face fell into a plate of tortilla chips. By the time I’d gotten back to the comfort of my couch, I had but begun to explain the notion of “Chinese Jokic” to my girlfriend before my favorite team drafted another flawed guard. She wisely saw herself to bed once the Nets drafted the admittedly springy defensive talent Drake Powell, narrowly avoiding my spasmodic, convulsive rage when Brooklyn followed “the Israeli D’Angelo Russell” with the somehow clumsier Danny Wolf and his sobbing brother.

In sum, the Nets spent their record-high five first round draft selections on a group of young men—Egor Dëmin, Nolan Traore, Drake Powell, Ben Saraf, and Danny Wolf—of whom four ostensibly share the same skillset and at most one will obviously earn a second NBA contract. In attempting to outsmart everyone by compiling a team of five connective players (or, if you prefer, to build the entire plane out of the black box), the Nets front office re-established itself as the laughingstock of the league. Those who had spent the year developing big boards and steeping themselves in the perverted world of NBA scouting all simultaneously became the Joker; were the Nets fanbase even slightly bigger, it would have qualified as a mass psychotic event. In short, last year shook any sane Nets fan’s faith both in the team’s ability to execute their long-term vision and in the solidity of said vision itself.

Those who choose to be sports fans have decided to invest some degree of their happiness and fulfillment into the successes and failures of extremely wealthy people who do not know that they exist. Short of getting really loud on a third down, there is basically nothing that a fan can do to change the outcome of the event that they care so deeply about. As such, fandom is an exercise in secular faith: your choice, such as you have one, is to believe and care. It’s hard for me to keep my fan’s goggles off when evaluating the Brooklyn Nets. The rationalist in me understands intuitively how and why the Nets draft was a disaster; the romantic in me sees Traore’s burst or Dëmin’s crafty passing and entertains the possibility that he’s wrong. What’s done is done, the thinking goes. If you’re a fan, why not root for the guys to work out?

The question, ahead of this season, is more like why on earth you would be a Brooklyn Nets fan. Over the years, the Brooklyn Nets have through mismanagement, misfortune, and James Harden’s brief codeine addiction turned a singular opportunity into one of the direst situations in the league. It’s enough to break a fan’s spirit, and I would not begrudge anyone who felt their connection to the team permanently severed. What’s more challenging, on both a moral and pride-based level, is everything else. It’s Joe Tsai accelerating the implosion of the Big Three due to his disdain for Kyrie Irving only to roster as mentor for the Nets’ next generation Michael Porter Jr., a live-streaming cretin whose misogynistic “just asking questions” schtick makes Theo Von look like Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s the Nets—a team consciously and transparently concerned with expanding their global reach to compensate for a lack of domestic interest—using two straight picks on Israeli or Israeli-American players (who, to add insult to injury, fucking suck) in a not-so-thinly-veiled effort to become Israel’s team during their sustained genocide upon the people of Gaza, then doubling down by playing a preseason exhibition game against Israeli club Hapoel Jerusalem. It’s unwise to look to professional sports organizations as paragons of morality; like any corporate entity, they are concerned with profit. I root for the New York Yankees, who are probably going to add a Charlie Kirk statute to monument park at the rate things are going. And yet is hard to escape the feeling that it is immoral, in some meaningful way, to continue rooting for the Brooklyn Nets. One is less inclined to separate the art from the artist, so to speak, when the art is awful too. This season, we hardly even get Ian Eagle to sweeten the pot.

If someone is unable to look past these things, I do not begrudge them. It’s not clear that they can or should be looked past. As it stands, the prospect of an upcoming Nets season inspires within me a great anhedonia. And yet, whether due to ingrained muscle memory, a hare-brained quest to make meaning of the vulgar, or the latent fan’s hope that re-emerges whenever I least expect it, I will almost certainly continue to watch the Nets this year. At best, the team will show promise and glimmers of future success. Jordi Fernandez gets a lot out of a little from guys, Dëmin, Traore, and Powell remain interesting to me at least so long as they retain elements of the unknown, and I will be rooting for high-first-round rookies for the first time in as long as I can remember. More likely yet is that watching the team will be extremely funny. It is extremely funny that contract year Cam Thomas and newly-liberated Michael Porter Jr. will share the floor with a bunch of players whose only discernible talent lies in passing the ball; it is extremely funny that the Nets are surrounding a rookie class of three foreigners, one kid who watches anime, and Danny Wolf with Dumbest Man Alive Michael Porter Jr. and Aging Hypebeast Nic Claxton. It is, when you take a step back and a deep breath, really funny that Givony called Ben Saraf the Israeli D’Angelo Russell. My money is on the deserved latter, even if some deep crevice of my heart harbors hope for the former. For the time being, though, the question of whether or not the Nets deserve either a vibrant fanbase or meaningful success remains hypothetical.