Same As It Ever Was
Same As It Ever Was
The Brooklyn Nets are in the playoffs; plus Mikal Bridges and the weight of the world
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 would be punched in the chest for calling his universally loathed French teammate a bitch, stepped up to meet O’Neale at the three point line. O’Neale blew by him – a hint of a Shammgod into a standard crossover – before putting an up-and-under layup past the outstretched arm of Jaden McDaniels, who would go on to miss postseason play for punching a wall and fracturing his hand. Here was the type of play that Nets fans had the privilege of considering second nature for the past few years, almost always from Kyrie Irving. These fleeting expressions of brilliance feel differently now – different not just for their relative infrequence, but for the second-order surprise they provoke. Marveling not just at Royce O’Neales layup package, but also at the fact that you are marveling at Royce O’Neale’s layup package. Things change fast for Brooklyn Nets fans.
Rooting for the Brooklyn Nets, especially over the last four equally interminable and breakneck years, has meant learning to make sense of rapid upheaval. This sense of the constant need for adaptation feels, now that the dust has settled, like one of the foundational truths revealed by Nets fandom. The other two should go without saying: that the world as you imagine it should be will always fail to materialize and that patterns have a way of repeating themselves. As the Nets head into Philadelphia to begin the postseason and officially bring this season — and the era that this season saw end — to a close, it’s fair for Nets fans to ask what they can reasonably expect out of their relationship with the team. As best I can tell, the answer appears to be slowness — an end to the upheaval and rehauls, stability for better or worse. It is also fair for fans to ask whether that’s enough.
The Brooklyn Nets are in the playoffs again, this time against the Philadelphia 76ers. By now, the Nets making the playoffs has become a welcome regularity. Of course, it’s also the case that each of the last few playoff campaigns for the Nets have had radically different energies and expectations. The last few years have seen, in order: a feverish hope that the team might pull their act together against an intense desire for a nightmare season to end; tremendous, earth-destroying hope unwound by fate, injuries, and Joe Harris; a pro-forma bubble trip for a lost season that only committed sickos could come to care much about. This playoff trip is a new one yet, albeit one with an obvious analogue.
There’s no greater signifier than 2019 has returned, whether that sentence fills you with joy or dread, than the Nets playing the 76ers. It’s easy to compare the current Nets’ moment to the one that came in 2019 – the two bookends of the superstar era, two series against the 76ers, two scrappy if under-talented teams, two units whose selling points, more than anything else, appear to be positive vibes. The comparisons are instructive to a point, but incomplete. History rhymes, it does not repeat.
By most accounts, the Nets are in a significantly better place than they were than in the spring of 2019. Their team is more talented and well-rounded, more obviously a move or two away than their 2019 iteration. They have a player in Mikal Bridges who has demonstrated apparently genuine star potential, although perhaps not as much as Nets fans would be inclined to believe. They have a better chance to compete with the 76ers.
But what these Nets do not have, unlike their obvious point of comparison, is the freedom to speculate, to project seemingly impossible futures onto their gray-toned canvas. This team is better than they were in 2019, but fans lost something foundational: the free reign to hope for a homerun. That, of course, is because the Nets already did that – the Brooklyn Nets accomplished the most outlandish possible coup, rendering what once was fanatical speculation as cold reality. And, after hitting their homerun, the Nets fell over first base. The superstar era, as has been well over-established, failed dramatically, incomparably. It is over, and best left in the past. But it is harder to root for a mediocre, even if likeable and often quite fun, team without being able to hope for superstars to come in and save the day.
The superstars are gone, at least for now, while Joe Tsai and his vision govern the Brooklyn Nets. Whatever one’s feelings on Brooklyn’s blow-up, it is incontestable that it was a contest of competing future for the Nets organization. Tsai, as owners often do, won. Now, Nets fans have to contend with a reality dramatically different than the one they navigated in 2019: culture for culture’s sake, not to attract superstars. Stability not as the evolution from embarrassment but as a break from unmet expectations. For some, it’s better from the headaches; for others, it’s an unbelievable disappointment. Still, being a Brooklyn Nets fan means learning to live with it. Rooting for a professional sports team, one comes to realize, is not that far removed from the absurdity of rooting for a private corporation to succeed. These are owners’ teams: you just buy a jersey.
Yet while the prospect of projecting into a speculative sort of future is far darker than it was four years ago, so too, as I’ve mentioned, is the team at hand brighter. The Nets are Mikal Bridges’ team now, a sentence that months ago would have sounded like a punchline and now doesn’t sound all that bad. Since coming to Brooklyn, Bridges has been sensational. He defends sensationally, he flicks shots in at all three levels like a somehow more grasshopper-like Kevin Durant. He is also, perhaps most importantly to the Nets’ managing class, immediately and remarkably likeable.
For all of the similarities of the Nets’ situation, then, Mikal Bridges poses something new. Nets fans hoping for a jump beyond polite respectability and back into the sort of contention that resembles salvation are asked to root, for the first time in recent memory, for the development of the guy in front of them. There are no superstars waiting, either in the wings or frustratingly in the locker room. There is, right now, only the hope that Bridges continues his ascendance into something like bonafide stardom, becoming in his own sense the ur-Brooklyn Net: an overlooked castaway, an infectious celebration, a beaming smile, a politician on a PR circuit. It is almost impossible poetic that the Nets have ended their three-year dalliance with perpetually unavailable superstars through the man with the longest games-played streak in the NBA. In this and in every other way, Bridges has played precisely the role that the new look, low expectation, “feel-good” Nets demanded. One imagines Joe Tsai smiling, and whether in resignation or sincerity Nets fans are smiling too. But Bridges, as it stands, also remains the best hope of those Nets fans whose aspirations extend beyond league pass power rankings and tolerable predictability. These playoffs, and the season to follow, will be about whether he can bear that weight.
