For at least three days, the Knicks and Nets will call a truce on their battle for New York City.
That was the overarching message coming out of Wednesday afternoon’s press conference to announce the Knicks and Nets will co-host the 2015 All-Star Game, with the Nets hosting Friday and Saturday night’s events at Barclays Center and the Knicks hosting the actual All-Star Game at Madison Square Garden on Sunday Feb. 15.
“To our friends in Brooklyn, like so many other times when New Yorkers put their differences aside for something bigger, we are looking forward to giving our rivalry a rest — for a little bit,” Knicks owner James Dolan said with a smile, “to ensure that we deliver the very best All-Star experience the league has ever held.”
A similar tone came from every official who stepped to the podium, including NBA commissioner David Stern, deputy commissioner Adam Silver, Garden CEO Hank Ratner, Nets minority owner Bruce Ratner and Irina Pavlova, the president of Onexim, the investment vehicle through which Mikhail Prokhorov owns the Nets, and who was there in Prokhorov’s place.
The reason everyone involved had to make such an effort to declare that all sides are getting along was because of the frosty relationship between the two franchises ever since Prokhorov bought the Nets back in 2010 and soon after put up a giant billboard of himself and Jay Z overlooking the Garden announcing the Nets’ “Blueprint for Greatness.”
The teams have traded shots ever since, all the way up to ownership level, where Prokhorov has never missed a chance to take a shot at his now crosstown rivals. It eventually led to Stern, as reported exclusively in The Post, helping arrange a sit-down between Prokhorov and Dolan to ensure things never got out of hand, especially since they had never actually sat down and talked for an extended period of time during Prokhorov’s first three years as owner of the team.
“They never sat down [together before], and Mikhail had owned the team for quite a period of time by then, and it was just the right thing to do, to just get together and talk,” Pavlova said.
Both sides also made it clear, however, that the burnishing of the rivalry was at least partially driven by business motives. There is little doubt there is plenty of benefits for both teams off the court if both perform well on it.
“Of course,” Pavlova said. “It’s a rivalry. It’s all in jest. It’s fun. But I think it makes it more exciting.
“If we were just sitting around doing ‘Kumbaya’, it wouldn’t be that much fun for anyone.”
And there’s little doubt that for each team, the chance to showcase its brand-new arena — Barclays Center in Brooklyn for the Nets, and a fully transformed Madison Square Garden for the Knicks — was too good to pass up. To that end, Silver said the two sides needed little convincing when the league came to them about the idea of splitting the festivities between the two venues in order to bring the All-Star Game back to New York for the first time since 1998.
“Both of them saw this was a unique opportunity,” Silver said. “Such a large investment has gone into the so-called transformation of the Garden, it’s the equivalent of a new arena, plus you have the Barclays Center, so it was truly a unique circumstance.
“Given that both organizations knew we weren’t going to come back to New York two years in a row, when we went to both teams and said, ‘What’s the best way to share this?’ and ultimately we came up with two nights at Barclays and one night at the Garden.”
Silver also said that there would be a chance in the near future, potentially as soon as 2017 — the All-Star Game is expected to be in Toronto in 2016 — for Brooklyn to have an opportunity to host the actual All-Star Game.