The Nets have always had a nickname problem. They began their life as the New Jersey Americans but on July 15, 1968, they announced they were crossing a couple of bridges and settling in Nassau County. They also decided to change their name.
“It’s a good-sounding name, it has a good ring to it,” Arthur Browne, who then owned the team, explained. “It ties in with the Mets and the Jets and has a basketball connotation. We didn’t like it last year when headline writers shortened our name to ‘Amerks.’ They won’t be able to shorten this one.”
(Yes, remarkably, there was a time when it seemed cutting edge to brazenly bond your brand so closely to the Mets and Jets you wanted to rhyme with them. The New York Sets of World Team Tennis followed suit a few years later, though they wised up and couldn’t change their name to “Apples” soon enough.)
But really … Nets? Why not the Rims? Why not the Sneakers? Why not the Headbands?
And now, why not … the Brooklyn Marks?
It makes sense, you know, and for three reasons. Sean Marks is the general manager, and while the announcement has never passed across my desk, apparently in the last few years he was appointed and anointed Boss for Life by Joseph Tsai, the man who actually owns the team. He has also been allowed to make several lasting and permanent marks on what has always been a torturous and tortured franchise, most of them overflowing with slapstick and stupidity. And lastly: most of those deals have revealed the Nets to be easy marks for smarter front offices, a group that includes … well, all of them.
The Brooklyn Marks! Hey, if the Cleveland Browns can next year celebrate their 80th anniversary of being named for a person, why not the Marks? Sure, Paul Brown was actually good at his job, and popular in his city, but even he actually and eventually got fired from the team that bore his name.
It’s hard to fathom what Sean Marks might have to do to get fired in Brooklyn. He has more job security than Queen Elizabeth II (who was the boss in the UK for almost 72 years) and William O. Douglas (who took full advantage of his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court to the tune of 36 years and 7 months) combined. The Brooklyn Bridge has been a part of the Brooklyn skyline since 1883; it’s an urban myth that Marks had to beat the horse-and-buggy traffic that day to make his introductory press conference on time.
Monday Marks fired Jacque Vaughn, and let’s start with this: Vaughn is a good guy, and a fine basketball coach, but firing him in itself isn’t exactly inexcusable. Nice a man as he is, had Vaughn been allowed to stay, he would’ve had to start a 97-game winning steak beginning Thursday night in Toronto just to get to .500 for his career.
But if Vaughn has to go, Marks really should’ve been his wheelman in the car taking them both away from the Nets’ waterfront headquarters. Vaughn joins Kenny Atkinson and Steve Nash as coaches that Marks has been allowed to hire, and now fire. It seems entirely possible that the final coach Marks will fire as Tsai’s consigliere hasn’t been born yet.
Marks has fancied himself the Crown Prince of Culture from the day he was introduced as GM on Feb. 18, 2016. It was Mikhail Prokhorov who hired him, but it has been Tsai who has emboldened and enabled him, surely because he’s been charmed by all of Marks’ paeans to culture. Literally Marks’ very first sentence on the job ended this way:
“I look forward to the challenge of creating a unified culture and building a winning team.”
And here’s the kicker: For a while, Marks wasn’t just true to his word, the idea worked. He hired Kenny Atkinson as coach, drafted Jarrett Allen, assembled a likeable cast of overachievers who took a game off the 76ers in Game 1 of the 2019 playoffs. Marks and Atkinson were in lockstep, and what they were building was so impressive to the outside that it helped lure Kevin Durant.
That should have been a triumphant peak for Marks, but instead it marked the beginning of a steep downfall that won’t end until he’s finally relieved of his duties sometime in the 2061 season. Durant begat Kyrie Irving, who Marks not only spent three years coddling even as he was wandering farther and farther off the (apparently flat) planet, it also led to a divorce with Atkinson. Irving begat James Harden, and then Ben Simmons.
It’s been one slapstick moment after another these last 4 ½ years, and it all culminated with the Nets resting most of their key players in a Christmas Week game at Barclays Center against the Bucks. The Nets are 6-18 since. Vaughn was forced to wear that night, but if you believe that was Vaughn’s idea … well, congrats, the Williamsburg Bridge will look nice in your backyard. Apparently culture doesn’t include either courage or accountability in Marks’ playbook.
But, then, why should it? We should all have such patient bosses. Marks has acted like a man begging to be fired for years now. It’s just that Joseph Tsai is the only one who can’t hear his pleas. So why not just go all the way? Consider it done.
Welcome to the Brooklyn Marks.
