You Can't Quit The Brooklyn Nets, But You Can Try
Plus, pouring one out for Steve Nash
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. Deranged, real-hooper-pilled Kobe Stans like Ball Don’t Stop lament that on-court artistry is devalued at the behest of calculator rats, committed to turning basketball into a soulless algorithm. Both critiques have kernels of truth to them, but are largely trivial for their fundamental misunderstanding of what the NBA is. There is no inherent value in basketball for basketball’s sake - perhaps there is for the players, but there is not for you. For you, it is your soap opera, your circus, your invitation to divest the manic psychic energy of your life into the comings and goings of a group of abstracted multimillionaire athletes. The game is incidental to this drama; it is the host body that gives the real business of the NBA its lifeblood.
By this measure, the Brooklyn Nets are the only true NBA team of the 2020s. Following the Nets is not about liking basketball. It is about being unable to disconnect yourself from the online mania that basketball gives you license to inject into your veins, it is the fandom equivalent of being unable to stop pressing refresh. Our dopamine hits are not wins and losses, but the addictive agony of feeling one’s fate tied to the happenings of an astroturfed circus. It’s the allure of knowing you’re always only one step away paired with the knowledge, embedded deep in your bones, that the stupidest possible outcome is the one that will come.
When I talk about Nets fandom being a platonically Online experience, this is what I mean. It’s not just that all Nets fans exist online because they are dispersed and physically unreal, although that much is true too. It’s that following the Nets doles out the same sort of punishment as does following any sort of inherently online endeavor (my personal analogue is my experience engaging in online Left politics, but yours may not be; still, you know the feeling). It’s about contorting yourself to justify any possible outcome and to win any possible argument, it’s about knowing that what you’re addicted to is meaningless and logging onto Twitter anyway. It’s knowing that the only possible outcome was the Nets firing their head coach seven games into the season and hiring a head coach currently suspended for sexual misconduct, because firing their head coach during the offseason and hiring literally any other coach would have made too much sense and, as such, would not have been funny. It’s having the PR coordinator quit amidst it all.
I’ve had plenty of moments over the past few months where I considered, to a significant degree, quitting the Nets entirely: the Celtics sweep the obvious starting point, the Durant request its high-water mark, Irving’s press conference the most recent iteration. What today’s hullaballoo taught me (or rather reminded me, as I’ve been taught this many times before) is that I cannot quit. That it is the logic of the Brooklyn Nets to always devolve into absurdity, yes, but an absurdity that you cannot stop watching. I’ve seen a lot of people today claim that they are done with the Nets, and to the extent that they say this for moral reasons I wish them all of the best and commend them for being bigger people than I. I wonder, though, whether they’ll truly be able to say goodbye - if my experience is any indication, there is a fire within you that only the train wreck at Flatbush & Atlantic can keep stoked.
Of course, one person has certainly left Brooklyn’s house of horrors tonight - Steve Nash. A few words are in order for Steve. Nash’s tenure was snakebitten from the start, from the infamous Kyrie “I don’t really see us having a head coach” soundbite to Sean Mark’s commitment to handing him teams consistently shorter than the New York Yankees roster, but that should not excuse his failure, which was absolute. Nash was unique as a head coach for being explicitly handed the role of “vibe management.” His charge was not managing rotations or drawing up plays, despite Nets fans’ protestations; it was, and always had been, to Manage The Vibes.
It is a beautiful, wonderfully poetic irony that Nash’s tenure as vibe manager would coincide with the most prolonged and profound case of Fucked Vibes in professional sport history. Failure can be as beautiful as success if you’re willing to appreciate its contours, and I feel Nash’s deserves its praise. The Nets have always had bad coaches, but they have given us something, be it PJ Carlesimo’s desperate rasp, Avery Johnson’s “we battled,” or Jason Kidd’s infamous demand that Tyshawn Taylor knock the drink out of his hands to force a timeout. Nash gave nothing (I assign authorship of “ramping up,” that infamous phrase, to the medical staff). He was a purely incorporeal form, floating spectrally from one loss to the next, an ashen-faced stand in for the rage of a collective fanbase.
Steve Nash is gone now, which means the Vibe is Shifting. Like that other great change, Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, it’s almost certain that all of this fanfare will translate to little difference in practical reality. The Nets will continue to suck and I will continue to watch. Still, I worry for Nets fans who, despite the mounting evidence that this entire endeavor was doomed from the jump, were able to blame Steve Nash for an entire organization’s failings night in and out. If history is any precedent, the malcontents will find a new scapegoat: Marks is a likely target, Tsai a more deserving one. They will pale in comparison - Steve Nash, though never really here, was a perfect sin-eater.
you're my new favorite writer just for reminding me of The World Needs to Change