YOU KNOW WHO has a right to be upset?
Those select few thousand Nets fans who sat through a quarter century of dreadful basketball, who supported the team when it played in Piscataway, who followed them to the Meadowlands, who had to absorb all the easy knocks during all those long years when the Nets were all but swallowed whole by the shadow of the Knicks.
These are people who would show up when there was little reason to show up other than the most obvious: a pure, unadulterated affection for a team they adopted, for better or for worse, as their own. They weeded through hundreds of brutal basketball nights to get what they got the past three years, a team that not only rewarded their loyalty but nudged them tantalizingly close to basketball’s promised land.
It’s hard to say what’s worse: rooting for a team that never gives you a prayer, or rooting for one that teases you so terribly, then, in the course of a year:
1. Announces it’s moving two bridges away.
2. Allows one of its cornerstone players to leave for a song.
3. Sits still as its other cornerstone players threaten to take their ball and go home if they aren’t allowed to, well, take their ball and go home.
And still there are people who will wander over to the Meadowlands this year, even on nights when Shaq-du-Soleil isn’t in town. Too many times the past few years you would read stories and hear radio complaints about all the people who were staying away from Nets games; maybe it’s time to turn the tables completely, and heap loads of unfettered praise on those who will actually be there.
You know who has no right to be upset?
We’ll limit that answer to two of the great ingrates to ever populate a Nets roster (a long and glorious lineage, indeed): Jason Kidd and Alonzo Mourning.
Kidd has turned into an amazing piece of work, and those of us who ran out of adjectives trying to describe his brilliance during his first three years in New Jersey (and believe me, I’m at the front of that dubious line) look back in shame at how completely we were fooled by his good-guy act when he arrived.
What’s plain as the terror in Joumana Kidd’s voice during that old 911 call is that Kidd played every one of us from the moment he arrived. He charmed us into believing he was a team-first first-team good guy who was different from so many of the self-centered superstars who run rampant in pro sports today. Sure he was. He had to be. Machiavellian sociopaths don’t get rewarded with max-out deals, and with the forum he was granted from the moment he arrived here to serve as de facto GM.
Kidd got his max-out deal from the Nets after dancing his silly dance with the Spurs a year-and-a-half ago, and almost from the moment the ink was dry on his contract, he began acting as if he accepted that nine-figure deal at gunpoint. First, he engineered the palace coup that sent Byron Scott packing. Now, as he holds the team hostage waiting for his knee to heal, he acts as if the fine print of his contract owes him the right to play for a contender now, instead of suffering through the bruises of rebuilding.
Kidd’s act grew tired a long, long time ago. Now it’s sickening. If playing for a championship every year was truly that important, he should have taken a few shillings less and gone to San Antonio when he had the chance. He didn’t. He stayed here. He forfeited his right to whine the moment he forfeited the chance to play Sundance to Tim Duncan’s Butch.
And Mourning forfeited the right to say anything at all when the Nets agreed to give him over $5 million a year for four years at a time when no other NBA team would come near him or his damaged kidney. When Mourning’s health forced him into another retirement last year, he was rightfully showered with praise for his courage, and the Nets were forgiven their foolish gambit.
Now, Mourning plays the same card as Kidd, and again we all look like a batch of rubes for buying into feel-good aspect of his story. Just like Kidd, Mourning acts as if all the Nets’ offseason purge was a personal attack on him, an affront to his goal of winning a championship. He wants out now? He can agree to give back the money. Otherwise, he can spend it in silence.
Otherwise known as the official soundtrack to Nets basketball for now and for the immediate future.
VAC’S WHACKS
If anyone still believes coaches can’t make a difference in the NFL, all you have to do is look at how stubbornly Tiki Barber holds on to the ball now. Barber always was on the cusp of greatness; he’s all the way there now, thanks to the fact he never puts the ball on the ground anymore.
Let’s just say that with the way the kid in Pittsburgh is playing, Eli Manning better be awfully good when the shrink wrap finally comes off. Whenever that is.
John Abraham is a wonderful advertisement for those who think all pro athletes should play on one-year contracts.
The Cardinals still haven’t shown up for the World Series.