New York City is the Mecca of basketball. I didn’t make that up. It’s a fact. Actually, the entire Northeast corridor has a very heavy basketball influence. That would include New Jersey as well. When you roll all of that up, sprinkle in the NBA, you have the Knicks and the Nets. I wouldn’t exactly say that Knicks vs. Nets qualifies as a rivalry today, but at the very least it gets people in the area talking when these two teams face one another. Each respective fan base has been clamoring for a winner for years so the passion is still omnipresent.
Both teams were in the LeBron sweepstakes last summer and they are each reportedlyalive in the new Carmelo frenzy. Then, of course, you have the Nets who will soon relocate to Brooklyn and the Knicks who do not want them to use “New York” in their name when the Nets do in fact move.
Tuesday night the two teams squared off at The World’s Most Famous Arena for backyard bragging rights. The Knicks would go on to triumph 111 – 100 and improve to 10 – 9 while the Nets fell to 6 – 12. However, the game was just the grand finale because there was some marketing beef that ensued prior to tip off.
A few months ago, right as the free agency period was set to get underway, the Nets displayed a massive 227 – foot billboard, right near Madison Square Garden, of brand new majority owner Mikhail Prokhorov and part-owner Shawn Carter. They were under the headline that read “Blueprint for Greatness.” That was a very interesting place for the Nets to choose to market their team. The first jab was thrown.
The Knicks returned serve by unveiling billboards of their own, featuring their brand new franchise player, Amar’e Stoudemire, a few days before the start of the season. Where did they decide to put them? In Brooklyn, where the new Nets arena will eventually be constructed. The Knicks then took it a step further by recently releasing a radio spot that said “Hey Nets. You can walk like us, you can talk like us, but you ain’t never gonna be like us.” Just hours before tip off of last night’s game, Prokhorov responded to that radio ad by stating, “I don’t think we want to be like the Knicks. I think we’d more like to resemble the Lakers.” Sure, he has to say that but they sure have a long way to go to resemble Kobe and company.
The players on both sides seemed to have gotten a chuckle out of all of this, and I think it has been elevated to this level simply to mask the fact that there really isn’t an on-court rivalry between the two. Maybe this is the end of the marketing back-and-forth for now, but the reality is we would rather see beef amongst the players rather than in the boardroom.
If you’re looking for your everyday, predictable basketball talk, then go somewhere else, because Kevin Burke of The Kevin Burke Project brings provocative, thought provoking content about basketball as only he can. Kevin also hosts The Hoop Doctors weekly podcast show, which you can subscribe to for free on iTunes. Follow Kevin on Twitter and Facebook
