Who is at Barclays Center for playoff games? Not die-hard Brooklyn Nets fans
By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist
BROOKLYN — On Monday, the New York City radio station Hot 97 ran a promotion.
If you were one of the first 97 people in line that morning at Barclays Center, you could secure a voucher for a discounted ticket to watch the Brooklyn Nets take on the Milwaukee Bucks in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference semifinals.
The price? Nine dollars.
A few weeks ago, Knicks playoff tickets sold out in minutes. The cheapest available on the secondary market started around $300.
A man named Albert (who declined to give his last name) happened to be listening to the radio Monday, so he headed to Barclays and got in line at 8:30 a.m. Given that there were only about 15 people in front of him, he called everyone he knew and told them that if they wanted a deal on playoff basketball, there was one to be had.
Albert is a grown man and a native New Yorker. As he waited in line at the box office to claim his ticket, I asked him if he’d ever been a Knicks fan, seeing as the Knicks were here long before the Nets moved across the river from New Jersey.
He paused.
"I’m a basketball fan," Albert said. "And the Nets are taking the East. I know that for a fact. So I’m here for it."
Down the street, Simon Leung, his brother, Steven, and their friend Doug Jung were also there for it. The three of them were eating slices outside Artichoke pizza, a franchise just a few years older than Barclays that opened a location near the new arena in 2015. While the Leungs were wearing Nets gear, Jung was in a normal, grayish T-shirt.
I asked if they were Nets fans, given their outfits. Once again, a pause.
"I love basketball," Steven said as he sighed. "I followed basketball my whole life. I personally don’t love teams, but I love the game."
He once loved a team, though. Steven and Simon, who are in their late 30s and early 40s, grew up watching the Knicks. They were die-hard fans until John Starks missed 16 of 18 shots in Game 7 of the 1994 Finals.
"That was the year I decided I can’t," Simon said. "It was very traumatic. I'll never forget it. They disappointed me, and that’s why I don't subscribe to a team. It was a bad breakup. The one you never forget, you know?"
Jung is still a Knicks fan, and he enjoyed the brief playoff run the team went on this season. But he tagged along Monday to watch superstars Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
As for Steven, he shrugged when I asked if he is a Nets fan.
"I mean, New York just needs another championship, so let’s go, Nets, I guess," he said between bites of pepperoni.
As I left the Leungs and headed toward the arena, a man named Mark (who also wouldn’t share his last name) tried to sell me a bootleg Nets T-shirt. Business hasn’t been great across the city this year. But at least when the Knicks were still in the playoffs, those T-shirts sold better by Madison Square Garden than the Nets shirts have been at Barclays.
Mark doesn’t regret giving up his Knicks fandom for the Nets.
"It doesn’t feel bad, man," he said. "It’s a New York team, you know? The Knicks sold out for a long time. Now something new is in, and I'm gonna ride with the new wave."
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Ryan Pierce and his girlfriend, Amanda Feigin, stopped to buy a shirt from Mark. Pierce is from Iowa and roots for the Timberwolves, an experience that has been, in his words, "sad." Feigin grew up near New York City but didn’t really care about basketball before she started dating Pierce. When one of the couple’s friends said she was going to Game 2, the two got tickets Monday morning.
It cost them $60.
"The Nets have good colors," Pierce said. "A couple good players. I like the way they play, very propositional. They need fans, too. They’ve got real low prices."
Pierce is not wrong. Right now, some of the most passionate people at Nets games are there out of spite rather than love. One guy waiting to go inside Barclays wouldn’t tell me his name, but he was wearing a Knicks hat from the collection of playoff merch available at MSG. It said "WE HERE."
"I’m a huge Knicks fan," he said. "I’m here for the Bucks. I hate the Nets. I hate this superteam. The Knicks were horrible, dreadful. I’m upset. If KD or Kyrie were on the Knicks, this city would be electric. So I came here for the Bucks."
The problem is KD and Kyrie probably wouldn’t have had the same success with the Knicks that they’re having in Brooklyn. As my colleague Yaron Weitzman wrote Monday, the Nets have figured out a specific and delicate way to make things work between superstars and role players.
And by "make things work," I mean "demolish other teams." Brooklyn took care of Boston with a gentleman’s sweep and, with Durant leading the way, absolutely destroyed the Bucks 125-86 on Monday. The Nets are now up 2-0 in the series. And that's without James Harden.
Barclays didn’t reach the decibel levels that MSG did during the Knicks' playoff games, but people did "MAKE SOME NOISE," as the jumbotron instructed.
Don’t get me wrong: The Nets do have fans.
I looked into the matter this spring and found that most of them a) opted in when the team moved because they didn’t have a die-hard rooting interest before, b) are holdovers from the New Jersey days, c) are people like Simon who had their hearts broken by the Knicks and couldn’t take it anymore, d) are straight-up bandwagoners or e) are children growing up in Brooklyn and getting hooked by this team’s promising run.
Promising undersells it, though. The Nets are so good that anything less than a championship will be a failure. The team is a snowball rolling down a hill, cold as ice, gathering momentum as it barrels toward the Larry O’Brien Trophy.
And I suspect that as it rolls faster and faster, it will pick up more and more stray fans along its path, the way it snagged Manus McGuire when he moved to Brooklyn from Ireland.
McGuire told me how much he loved Durant as he stood with six of his friends near an outlet while one of them charged a phone. McGuire was the only one wearing a Nets jersey. The rest wore T-shirts in varying shades of gray, burnt sienna and green. I asked why they were there, and one of them shrugged.
"Playoff basketball?" I suggested.
"Yeah," one of them said.
"I’m a Knicks fan," another said.
These guys weren’t an anomaly. About half the fans I saw inside the arena weren’t wearing anything having to do with the Nets. Many people were in normal street clothes. I saw one guy wearing a Kobe jersey and a smattering of Bucks fans. The Trail Blazers, Celtics and Miami Marlins (????) were represented as well.
When I asked a guy buying a Nets jersey why he didn’t come wearing one, he said, "I’m not really into sports."
At the Garden two weeks ago, I didn’t see a single person who wasn’t decked out in Knicks gear, save a few gloating Hawks fans.
As they watch Nets games on TV, a lot of people are asking: Who is at Barclays for playoff games? Based on my findings Monday, the answer is mostly random people who figured they might as well go and "basketball fans."
Remember when Rob Lowe wore that hat that just said "NFL"?
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A lot of the people at Barclays might as well be walking around with hats that say "NBA." It speaks to the growing trend of rooting for players over teams.
None of what I found surprised me. There’s no way you can be a grown adult and a lifelong Brooklyn Nets fan. You can be a half-lifelong New Jersey Nets fan or a half-lifelong Brooklyn Nets fan, but the new iteration of this team has no history beyond the nine years Barclays has been open.
The Knicks still own the basketball soul of New York. This Nets superteam is the first step toward putting down roots and growing a legacy in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t happen overnight.
But in the meantime, if you want to watch NBA basketball deep into June in New York City, this is currently the only option.
It turns out that if you build it — and you snag three superstars — NBA fans will come.
Especially for nine dollars.
Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and co-host of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.