The Brooklyn Nets Drove Me Insane
This blog was originally created so that I could write about the Brooklyn Nets. Its scope has expanded, but the Nets nevertheless haunt these pages. Here is a chronological list of my Nets- and sports-centric writing.
Hector Banana-bread and the Prison of Banger-Hunting
For longer than anybody cares to remember, the most retweeted post in Twitter history was a selfie taken by Bradley Cooper and posted by Ellen DeGeneres from the Oscars. It was a cheap gag, essentially—a hack bit in which Ellen intentionally set out to create the most-retweeted post of all time and correctly predicted that a photo of a group of movie st…
LaMelo Ball and the Brainrotted Human Spirit
Every time I see LaMelo Ball, it’s because he’s done something insane. Like: about halfway through the first quarter, while the Hornets were losing at home to the imploding Phoenix Suns (having scored only five points in the game’s first six minutes) LaMelo Ball did something so heartwarmingly insane that it cannot be banished from my mind’s eye. With m…
Brooklyn in the Bardo
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, Californi…
The Brooklyn Nets Accept Death With Dignity
The Brooklyn Nets’ new future was born on a day that began, against all odds, with Nicolas Claxton debuting a lower lip tattoo that reads ‘PUNK.’ The Nets, a franchise for whom the last 6 year-long Greek tragic arc from charming upstarts to would-be world-beaters to abject laughingstocks was measured in terms of vibes—underdog vibes, vibes in lieu of co…
What is Aura?
V.I. Lenin once remarked that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” Last week, someone used the word “aura” in a scouting report of Kentucky prospect Rob Dillingham. If modern basketball fandom is an exercise in symbiosis with the online discourse surrounding the game itself, then seasons can be neatly short…
Dispatch: Never Hungover at the Barclays Center
I’m in my parents’ basement, home for the holidays, finger hovering over the “confirm purchase” button, preparing to consummate the frankly Satanic Christmas gift my youngest brother and I have devised for each other, an agreement to split tickets to see the reeling Brooklyn Nets take on a Detroit Pistons team in the process of setting the NBA record fo…
Dispatch: Never Hungover at the Superdome
The biggest story in football is the arranged marriage between Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, one which has brought unprecedented eyes and attention to the NFL regular season. The second biggest, against all odds, is an Italian kid who lives with his family in the New Jersey suburbs named Tommy DeVito. Heading into Sunday, DeVito had been tasked with se…
The Ben Simmons Season
The NBA returns this week, which means that the Brooklyn Nets return this week, which means that Nets fans, in no short order, will need to find their why. This time last year, Brooklyn Nets fans harbored sincere, if ultimately unsupportable, championship aspirations: this before an appallingly flat start to the season, the revelation of another under-c…
The Casuals Won't Be Addressed
Last week, Damian Lillard was finally traded by the Portland Trailblazers. In keeping with Lillard’s disposition, his farewell to the city of Portland was equal parts earnest and embarrassing; it, of course, included him rapping. The trade mercifully ended what had become the most tedious story of a tedious NBA offseason—by its end, everybody, including…
You Can't Stay Here: The Never Hungover Nets Prospectus
The NBA offseason: the best part of the year for an NBA fan, where one no longer finds themself burdened with the duty of actually watching basketball, where fandom becomes pure discourse, abstraction, speculation and projection without the tiresome and time-consuming pretext. The offseason is the time of year that calls for a blog like
Same As It Ever Was
Royce O’Neale surprised me. It was the second quarter of an early April game against the Timberwolves – early April, that twilight hour in the NBA governed only by absurdity; professional basketball’s delirious funhouse mirror – and Royce O’Neale ripped down a rebound to go coast-to-coast. Kyle “Slow Mo” Anderson, a New Jersey legend who just days later…
PATIENTLY HATING #2: March Madness
A spectre is haunting criticism – the spectre of Poptimism. Whether or not poptimism as it’s currently understood is responsible for the decline of popular culture into a sort of soulless, algorithmically-generated slop is incidental to the fact that it has become the default critical posture during the exact moment that all culture became pop and all n…
It's Over; or, We Were Eight Games in Power
“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,
Dispatch: Never Hungover at the Smoothie King Center
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Kevin Durant is reading this
“Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” - Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
A Tribute to LeBron James as Pathological Liar
LeBron James is lying again. You’ve seen the threads, at this point, of LeBron’s greatest hits in his career as a the NBA’s resident pathological liar. There was a time when Lebron’s flair for the dramatic was a Twitter deep cut, an inside joke between the most terminally online of NBA fans. A remember when. By now, it has transformed from a fact of lif…
You Can't Quit The Brooklyn Nets, But You Can Try
The most compelling complaint in response to the breathless, twee, #ThisLeague Twitterification of the NBA is that the most valued part of the league is no longer, by a long shot, what happens on the court. “Player empowerment” critics bemoan the feeling that the NBA is destabilized by the frenetic movement of star players from one home to the next. Der…
Who are Nets fans?
It’s the ten year anniversary of the Nets’ first game in Barclays Center, which evidently means that it is time once more to renew the “Nets have no fans” discussion. It’s not worth engaging with the discourse as it typically manifests itself – today’s iteration prompted by a hilarious
Custody Battle: Nets vs. Pelicans
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 sta…
I got two vaccines and watched the Nets play a preseason game
1:00pm I see that the Brooklyn Nets play their first preseason game of the year tonight against the Philadelphia 76ers. The diligent gumshoes of NetsDaily ensure me that all key Nets will be playing. The poetry of Ben Simmons making his debut appearance as a Net against his former team in an exhibition game that could not matter less reveals itself to m…
It is happening again; or, Nets Media Day
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.