Should You Switch Loyalty from the Knicks to the Nets? YES
The concept of loyalty is something that people value pretty highly. Whether this loyalty implicates family, country, or sports team, the idea of faith and allegiance is something that society promotes as an objectively good thing. Well, I call bullshit on this. Total bullshit. Because, just like the family or the country you’re born into, the sports teams that you’re drawn to are just as much an accident of birth. And in the same way that I would recommend that you not feel obligated to love your family if your family was full of dicks or serve in your country’s armed forces if you knew your country was involved in an immoral, pointless war, I also think that it is a totally fine thing to stop following a team that has an incompetent, megalomaniacal blowhard for an owner and shows outright disdain for its fans. Especially when you live in Brooklyn and finally have a pro team to call your own.
That said, if you decide to make the switch and put your blue-and-orange gear in the back of your closet in favor of the Nets’ sleek new black and white logoed goods, you will encounter some—actually probably a lot—of negative feedback from people you know who will call you a “turncoat” or a “fairweather fan” or a “total pussy shithead” as my brother called me. And because I want you to have a better response ready for these people than my response to my brother (which was to say over and over to him, until he turned away from me in a mixture of disgust and frustration, Isiah Thomas, Isiah Thomas, Isiah Thomas) I thought I’d break down all the perfectly justifiable reasons for changing from a Knicks fan to a Nets fan.
1) James Dolan
Dolan is an absolutely horrible owner. It’s not just that he doesn’t care about the fans or, apparently, the team, but he doesn’t even pretend to care about anything other than his classic rock band, which is actually named JD and the Straight Shot. He let Jeremy Lin—the most exciting thing about the Knicks in YEARS—go without a second thought. He’s terrible. And New Yorkers switched allegiances from the Yankees to the Mets for similar problems with Steinbrenner and nobody gives Mets fans a hard time.
