If nothing else this season, I’m going to enjoy watching the Knicks and Nets go back and forth at each other like four-year-old girls fighting over a Barbie doll. The battles will be both on the court — the Knicks are the Nets first home game in the Barclays Center — and in the media. And it should last — they both should be playoff teams in the East (man I am hoping for a first-round matchup).
There will be petty sniping back and forth at each other because the Nets are trying to establish themselves in Brooklyn and the New York market.
There’s a long, detailed piece in New York Magazine about the Nets move, mostly a reminder that the Barclays center is part of a real estate deal and the Nets were just a cog in that to make sure it happened. But the petty sniping between owners — the Nets Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and the Knicks James Dolan — found its way in.
(Prokhorov told me back in December that he plans on attending a quarter of the regular-season games and “all the playoff ones.” He also made sure that I heard him call Dolan “that little man.”)
“The little man.” Petty. But I find it amusing nonetheless, and wait for the Knicks to fire back. The Knicks can afford to take the high road — they are the established team in the market, they have the built up generations of loyal fans, they are the icons — but still there is tension between the teams you can feel.
