The Nets could have been a stone in the Knicks’ shoe from the start, from the moment they walked into the NBA, when they were supposed to have the brightest star in the sport anchoring their roster.
That didn’t happen. Julius Erving never played an NBA game as a Net, found himself exiled to Philly, and the team had to move across two bridges to escape the outrage.
The Knicks barely had to take notice.
The Nets should have been a stone in the Knicks’ shoe at the start of the last decade, when they assembled the most watchable, most enjoyable team east of Los Angeles, when Jason Kidd was lifting the franchise to dizzying heights at the same time Madison Square Garden was starting to resemble a basketball morgue.
That didn’t happen. The team still was datelined East Rutherford, N.J., still lying in state hard by Exit 16W.
The Knicks shook off ceding a portion of the 201 area code, still secure in dominating 212, 718 and 917.
This is different. Already. The Nets have yet to play a game in Brooklyn, have yet to conduct a single practice under the flag of the borough of churches, and already you can feel a shift in the way this is all playing out, regardless of whether Dwight Howard ever sets foot in Barclays Center, especially now that Deron Williams can finally and officially ponder a down payment on a place in Park Slope or Brooklyn Heights or Cobble Hill.
This isn’t to say they’re close to usurping the Knicks in popularity or even ready to put a serious dent in the Knicks’ dominance in the market. New York remains solidly blue and orange. There is history to contend with and the habits of a passionate basketball city and the fact that even as their team floated in putrid miasma for the better part of a decade Knicks fans remained among the most stubbornly, steadfastly loyal in town.
But they will notice the Nets now.
No, by itself, the Nets’ acquisition of Joe Johnson isn’t the kind of transaction that transforms the relationship between sporting neighbors. Joe Namath did that once, instantly announcing the Jets as legitimate business rivals to the Giants. Tom Seaver did that once, when the Mets plucked his name out of a hat and within three years were raising a World Series banner and outdrawing the Yankees 3-to-1.
But it certainly had to get the Knicks’ attention, especially in a week when their most likely path to a seminal offseason move — acquiring Steve Nash — took a hit when the Raptors handed Landry Fields a winning lottery ticket, when even the prospect of re-signing Jeremy Lin looks like it might take a perilous — and pricey — turn at any moment.
A league executive laughed when he talked yesterday about the new relationship between the teams: “As long as the Nets were in Jersey, the Knicks could treat them like they were headquartered somewhere in Wyoming. Now it’s like the Nets just moved into the Knicks’ attic.”
This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, of course. The city has craved — and gone without — a genuine basketball rivalry for each of the 36 years since the merger. And in the same way that the Rangers-Devils rivalry the last 20 years has never quite reached the epic level that Rangers-Islanders did in the ’70s and ’80s, a lot of that had to do with location.
The GW Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, they connected the Knicks with the Wyoming Nets. The Brooklyn, Manhattan and Williamsburg Bridges, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, they connect one city team to another city team. That matters plenty. It matters already. The Nets made back-to-back NBA Finals not long ago and the impact on the Knicks was about as great as removing a handful of sand from the Coney Island beaches.
One trade and one pending free-agent contract, and the Nets of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues already resound louder and longer than the Nets of the Jersey Turnpike and the Murray Hill Parkway ever did. A jump shot hasn’t even been launched yet.
But a shot fired in anger already has. Welcome to the new City Game.