In recent years the Nets have had some of the top talent in the league … in the broadcast booth.
That’s where play-by-play men Marv Albert and Ian Eagle have resided along with analysts Mark Jackson and Mike Fratello. They all are nationally recognized voices that have been calling games for a team that has fallen on hard times. With a revamped roster accompanying the team’s move to Brooklyn the hope is the team will be improved, especially becaust the fan support already is better.
“The Nets in New Jersey were thought of as a non-factor, as NBA Siberia in many ways,” Eagle said. “In Brooklyn, players are paying a lot of attention. The team was going to get a lot of coverage, there would be a great deal of buzz and this is one of the rare occasions where the reality has lived up to the hype.”
But Eagle swears by the work the broadcast and production team did through the lean years for the team in the Meadowlands and Prudential Center, even if the ratings did not match the effort.
“I would never insult the viewers that we had and say ‘now this is going to be so much better, and I am really going to give it my A game,’’’ Eagle said. “I just always treated these broadcasts like everyone in the city was watching, even though the ratings never reflected that. So, to me it doesn’t change the dynamic at all. It doesn’t change anything we are doing behind the scenes other than there might be more of a response. It’s just better for the franchise.”
With the team’s long-awaited move to Brooklyn coming to fruition, general manager Billy King overhauled the Nets roster after the team went 58-172 over the previous three seasons. Brooklyn re-signed Deron Williams, Brook Lopez, Kris Humphries and Gerald Wallace, traded for Joe Johnson and added a handful of complementary players to vastly improve the bench and the team’s playoff prospects.
“I see them in the postseason, but it’s so hard to say this early in the season. I think you need a minimum of a month to see what teams are capable of and what their identities are going to be,” said Greg Anthony, who signed on as a part-time analyst for YES last week.
“Because there are a lot of teams that have similar goals. They have the talent to be a postseason team, but how the talent meshes, how the chemistry comes together, [how the players] buy into the defensive side that will ultimately determine if they will just be a playoff team or one that can make a deep run into the postseason.”
Anthony’s first game in the Nets booth was Monday night at the Barclays Center when they blew a 22-point lead in a 107-96 loss to the Timberwolves. But still, there was a crowd there and others witnessed the painful loss from their homes.
“For the first time, in my 19th season, you can honestly say they have a home-court advantage,” Eagle said. “Never could say that in Jersey. For whatever reason that was never part of the equation. And you can already sense that Brooklyn has adopted this team, they’ve gotten behind it. It’s really a different vibe around the organization.”