The Brooklyn Nets Accept Death With Dignity

An overdue dispatch from the new age of Nets fandom

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 coaching staffs, unmistakably toxic vibes—the PUNK tattoo was a mark of finality. No rational observer could view the Nets as serious people any longer, if anybody still was in the first place. A vibe nadir had been scraped.

It’s always darkest before dawn

A few long hours after news of Claxton’s continued drift into the aesthetics of Playboi Carti’s entourage sent Nets fans spiraling further into a detached complacency, Mikal Bridges was traded to the New York Knicks; more consequentially, reporting indicated that the Nets had regained control of their next two assuredly high draft picks from the Houston Rockets. In one fell swoop, Sean Marks and the Nets’ front office put an end to an interminable year and a half of zombified indecision. The Nets had no decision but to blow up their abortive project; luckily for Nets fans, this forced decision was the right one.

For the first time since Kyrie Irving bailed on his vaccine appointment and James Harden was caught doing cocaine with Lil Baby by French paparazzi, Brooklyn Nets fans have something to feel good about. This collective joy—which, not incidentally, marks the end of years of online internecine warring about topics as ridiculous as Cam Thomas’ star prospects—is an odd one. The Nets already sucked; in the short term, they will be far worse. Fans still harbor delusions, whether about current players’ potentials or the likelihood of drafting future generational stars, but for the first time in most Nets’ fans memories these delusions are the sort that basically every other NBA fan nurtures. By dropping the facade of “fielding a competitive team” and “preserving future flexibility,” the Nets have finally freed their fans to root for a bad basketball team on their own terms. As it turns out, the experience is joyful and freeing.

Many among the commentariat have attempted to lay out a comprehensive history of the Nets’ woes since moving to Brooklyn; they have all failed to various degrees because none of them are Nets fans. What every cringe-inducing summary of the Nets’ recent missteps misses is the way in which Nets fandom, as long as I have practiced it, has been a continuous exercise in being taunted by forces that you cannot control. The fiction upon which NBA fandom rests is that suffering is rewarded. On a spiritual level, repeated failure makes the eventual promise of success that much more revelatory; on a practical level, failure bumps a team up in line for the next draftable star who might transport a beleaguered fanbase out of their cycle of misery. Nets fans, then, have been dealt a sort of double-injury: as fans of a team perpetually attempting to build a fanbase, they find themselves without a community to make sense of the spiritual failure with, while as fans of a team that habitually pawns off future assets to accelerate the process of building a base, they have endured years of terrible basketball while watching their draft picks build other teams into powerhouses. When the Nets have been bad, they have been a sort of unqualified, hopeless bad; fans have suffered without an identifiable purpose. When they have, on paper, been good, their prospects have been derailed by injuries, a pandemic, and the idiosyncratic preferences of three of the seventy-five best and oddest players to ever pick up a basketball. T.M. Brown, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books about Andy McCullough’s recent book on Clayton Kershaw, aptly describes how failure conditions both sports and sports fandom. But if sports fandom is about balancing occasional joy against the inevitable fact of limitations, the tragedy of Nets fans is both that there has been no success to feel joyous about and no meaning to the ceaseless failure.

The hope, of course, is that this cycle ended when the Nets dumped Mikal Bridges off to his college friends and regained their picks from the Houston Rockets in an act of senseless mercy that only renews my loathing for the Boston Celtics. The Bridges trade is the first unequivocally good thing the Nets have done since 2019; the only people voicing their reservations are those deluded enough to believe the Nets ever had a chance to overtake the Knicks in popularity and older fans, one of whom is quite vocal on the Internet, who understand the move as a tacit admission that the Nets may never compete for a championship in their lives. But the fact that this trade was the right move does not change that it, too, was the byproduct of a tremendous failure. For the past year and a half, Nets fans burnt by the inexplicably rapid dissolution of their superstar trio were offered the empty promise that the “feel-good Nets” were back. Mikal Bridges, a role player who momentarily looked like he could be something more, had a big smile, a fun celebration, and a love for Chipotle. For the past year and a half, being a Nets fan felt like being a normal person at the World Economic Forum. “You’ll root for a team of mediocre role players,” the line went, “and you’ll be happy.”

The problem was not just that the basketball was bad—though the basketball was bad—or that the memory of actually having a team worth rooting for was so fresh. The most egregiously frustrating part of the zombified feel-good era was that Joe Tsai was attempting to sell fans a vision of good vibes by cultivating what, pound for pound, may have been the worst vibe in the league. The experience was not dissimilar to that of Democratic voters being told, after Joe Biden showed his age in horrifying clarity on a national stage, that they did not see what they had seen. The feel-good Nets were miserable, both on and off the court, and the man that the organization so desperately believed would attract players and fans to the team transparently wished he was recreating college sleepovers with Knicks players. No matter how it ended, the last era of Nets basketball involved generational stars pretending to like being on the Nets. Kevin Durant, in a LeBron Jamesian lie, once claimed his legacy would be measured by his impact upon Cam Thomas. This time around, the person sold to fans as a tentpole star was plainly embarrassed to be a Brooklyn Net; worse yet, he wanted to be a Knick instead.

Nets fans should be grateful for Bridges’ discontent. By all accounts, his being so thoroughly charmed by the memory of hanging out with Josh Hart is what forced the Nets out of their inert limbo and into something like organizational direction. More, his disproportionate pick return left the Nets far better off than he found them. But the fact that the Nets’ disastrous course was averted by Bridges’ asking out should not distract people from asking how it was the Nets leadership ever thought they could build a future around a man this charmed by Josh Hart. For the first time in recent memory, a Nets failure has an obvious purpose; in exchange for an overrated malcontent, they have been gifted a future. But there is reason for fans to temper their newfound optimism: the people responsible for guiding them through the next few years are the same who would have chosen the path of mediocrity had Bridges had an ounce more shame.

For now, though, Nets fans can and should celebrate. For at least the next two years, they can gorge themselves on bad basketball as one would reality television. I will watch the Nets with the knowledge that it’s probably not very good for me, out of a perverse curiosity about the arcs and developments of my favorite characters, and with the vague feeling that I should have read a novel instead. But I will have fun doing it, both insofar as I expect the Nets to be bad and understand, rationally, that their short-term failure will be in service of long-term success. I will watch Cam Thomas shoot 40 shots a game, I will convince myself that journeymen contain unspoken promise, I will refresh Tankathon and dream a little. Better yet, the valid, unanswered questions about organizational leadership cannot take away from the notion that the people in charge of the Nets finally seem to be leveling with fans: the Nets are bad, this look in the mirror seems to say, and by embracing this perhaps one day they may not be. For the first time since the Nets moved to Brooklyn, fans will get to experience failure as a promise.