NBA

Nets-Knicks: The hyped rivalry that wasn’t

When the NBA’s schedule-makers rolled out the regular-season slate last summer, the eyes of the city’s basketball fans were drawn to April, when the Nets and Knicks were set to have a pair of showdowns virtually everyone assumed would be fraught with playoff implications — if not directly helping to determine which team would be crowned the winner of the Atlantic Division.

Instead, the fourth and final installment of this year’s clash between the teams will take place at Barclays Center on Tuesday with little fanfare. The Nets are all but certain to be the fifth seed when the playoffs open this weekend, while the Knicks will watch from home after being eliminated over the weekend.

It’s a fitting end to what has been a dreadful season series between the teams, featuring three blowouts — the Knicks winning at Barclays Center by 30 in December and by 29 at the Garden in April, with the Nets picking up a 23-point win over the Knicks in Manhattan in January — though you won’t see the Nets spending too much time worrying about it.

“It doesn’t matter to me at this point,” Deron Williams said after the Nets beat the Magic 97-88 Sunday. “We’re just worried about the playoffs, worried about what’s going on in this locker room and what we’re doing on the court. So as far as [the rivalry is] concerned, it definitely would be good for the city to have a strong rivalry between the boroughs, but there’s still a lot of time.”

As the Nets prepared to make the move across the Hudson back in 2012, there was plenty of talk about the potential for a genuine rivalry between the city’s NBA teams. And while they have engaged in some verbal sparring — particularly last summer, when Raymond Felton and Paul Pierce took turns taking shots at the other’s team — that hasn’t translated to the court.

Because the four games between the Nets and Knicks in the first season they shared the city were all wrapped up by January 2013, it has been more than a calendar year since they played a competitive, meaningful regular-season game. In the meantime, the Nets went through a taut, tense seven-game series with the Bulls last spring — and now appear on track to play them again in the first round this season — and also have had four close games with their other potential first-round opponent, the Atlantic Division-champion Raptors.

Factor in the hatred and venom for the Heat that was immediately installed in the Nets the second they acquired Pierce and Kevin Garnett from the Celtics last summer, and suddenly the two city rivals aren’t solely focused on each other anymore.

Now, after the teams wrap up their regular season over the next two days, the Nets will have the playoff stage all to themselves.

“I think it’ll be good for us to kind of be the only team playing, and all of the focus being on us as far as the fans are concerned,” Williams said. “I think that’s good for Brooklyn basketball, for our brand, for the attention to be on us.

“We have to make the most of that opportunity and hopefully put together a run.”