Yes, the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets collided at the sold-out Barclays Center in the 2019-20 NBA season’s second contest for both teams, both teams were cheered and both teams were booed, the fans in the building were split in their allegiances and traded taunts, and the players scuffled on the court during a game that went down to the wire. The two squads will meet a few more times this season and the same thing will happen. Sounds like a rivalry, doesn’t it? It sure does, except Knicks vs Nets is not a rivalry, and in the 40-plus years both teams have competed as members of the National Basketball Association, it never has been.
THEY’RE SELDOM GOOD AT THE SAME TIME
Over the four decades since the Nets joined the NBA, it appears they’ve been taking turns being good. Consider that the last extended run of good Knicks’ basketball came during the Patrick Ewing years. They qualified for the playoffs for 14 consecutive seasons from 1988 through 2001, the only year Ewing wasn’t on the roster in that stretch. During that time the Nets never won more than 45 games, lost 50 or more games nine times—it would have been 10 but for the lockout-shortened 1998-99 season—and lost in the first round of the NBA playoffs four times. One of those playoff defeats came against the 1993-94 Knicks, who went on the the NBA Finals before losing to the Houston Rockets.
The very year after that Knicks’ playoff appearance in 2001 and the negative effects of the Ewing trade started to kick in, the Jason-Kidd led Nets advanced to the NBA Finals while the Knicks staggered to a 30-win season. The Nets reached the Finals for the second consecutive year in 2003 while the Knicks landed in the lottery once again.
The last time both teams were good was during the 2012-13 season when the Knicks, led by Carmelo Anthony, won 54 regular-season games and reached the Eastern Conference semifinals, while the Nets won 49 games but were eliminated in the first round by Chicago in seven games. That year the two teams could have met only in the Eastern Conference Finals, which could have been the start of a true rivalry.
LIMITED KNICKS-NETS PLAYOFF HISTORY
Since the two teams are rarely good at the same time, the result is a limited number of meaningful contests between the two. The Knicks and Nets have only met in the post-season three times, all in the first round and including a best-of-three series won 2-0 by the Knicks in 1983, the first time the teams met in the playoffs. The Knicks were actually the lower seed (5th).
It would be another 11 years until the two teams met in the 2004 NBA playoffs, with the eventual Eastern Conference champion Knicks disposing of the Nets, 3 games to 1. Another 10 years passed before the teams met again in postseason play, when the Nets swept the Knicks in a non-competitive four-game series highlighted by the three-quarter court “bowling ball assist” from Jason Kidd to Lucious Harris for a layup. The series also featured a brief scuffle and some ensuing trash talk between the Knicks’ Tim Thomas and the Nets’ Kenyon Martin (see “Fugazy”), but nothing worthy of an ongoing rivalry between teams.
Fifteen years have gone by and the teams haven’t met in a playoff series since. Other than an opportunity for local bragging rights for the winning team’s fan base, the games between the two teams have been without larger implications.
THE PLAYERS DON’T KNOW EACH OTHER
With all the player movement in recent years and the wild free agency period in July 2019, it would have been difficult for two rosters to drum up a dislike for their opponent in the second game of the regular-season. With most teams playing only four preseason games with rosters full of new players, it’s likely that some of the players aren’t fully aware of the opponents’ roster, and are barely familiar with their own.
Even though it’s really all about disdain for the other team’s jersey, this is hardly the stuff rivalries are made of.
BUT THE PLAYERS DO KNOW EACH OTHER
You won’t see a team storm off the court at the end of a series without shaking hands and before the game is over like the 1991 Detroit Pistons did as they were about to be eliminated by the Chicago Bulls. These days more of the players are friends, share agents and devise ways to end up on the same team.
There will always be individual beefs between players, but NBA rivalries between teams are rare these days. This year the Lakers-Clippers battle will be interesting because they are both legitimate title contenders sharing a building on the heels of a 2019 free agency period which saw both teams pursue the same players.
A SHARED HISTORY
Both teams have been coached by Larry Brown. Bernard King, Ray Williams, Stephon Marbury, Keith Van Horn, Kenyon Martin and many others have played for both teams. And in a piece of history no long-time Knicks fan wants to remember or even believe, the Knicks could have had Julius Erving right after the NBA-ABA merger in exchange for waiving a territorial fee from the Nets, but the Knicks declined.
In other words, were the Nets in better financial condition, they could have entered the NBA in 1977 with Julius Erving AND Nate “Tiny” Archibald on their roster, but since they weren’t, the Knicks could have had Julius Erving. That neither one happened makes 1977 one of the lowest points in the professional basketball history of the metro NYC area.
The Knicks were quite average around the time of the merger, but the Nets entering the NBA with Erving and Archibald would have resulted in an instant rivalry with the more established Knicks, even with the Nets still based on Long Island.
We’ll never know.
RIVALRIES ARE REAL, NOT IMAGINED
Nice try, but rivalries on a professional level aren’t created by proximity or fights between fans or an on-court disagreement, but by a series of hotly-contested games of importance over time. In the NBA, for example, in a 30-team league, there aren’t enough games against a potential rival to create a rivalry. The Lakers and Celtics had a rivalry for decades because they met in the NBA Finals often, each team’s fan base had a legitimate reason to despise the opposition, and the players were able to do the same. Those games were nasty, even though the teams were based 3,000 miles apart.
For four consecutive years—1988 through 1991—the Chicago Bulls and the Detroit Pistons collided, both literally and figuratively, during the NBA playoffs. With little roster turnover during that time, each team was able to develop a genuine animus toward the other, and it showed on the court. As each team’s fortunes have changed over time, there are few who’d consider Bulls-Pistons a rivalry in 2019.
After this season’s early matchup between the Knicks and the Nets, some in the print media proclaimed the rivalry had “returned” because of a brief shoving match between players just months after the Nets’ signing of two top free agents the Knicks coveted this past summer. That signing may have been the first sign of a developing rivalry, but until the Nets convert those free agent signings into winning and, at the same time, the Knicks break their two-decade stretch of mostly losing resulting in some memorable playoff series between the two, what holds true now will continue.
You can’t talk a rivalry into existence, and Knicks vs Nets is not a rivalry.
At least, not yet.
Photo by Anthony Rosset on Unsplash
