"The post-hype Nets begin again," and it's brutal

A brutal account of last night's season debut of the Brooklyn Nets vs. the Chicago Bulls, from Howard Megdal in Politico NY, The post-hype Nets begin again:

A crowd seemingly aware of the bleak present and future showed up in Brooklyn Wednesday night. Large patches of empty rows could be seen throughout the lower bowl, and even in the mostly filled upper levels, the crowd energy veered far closer to golf than Garden. No one in the starting lineup was cheered sufficiently to stand out as the most popular Net.
Nets shops around the stadium's lower bowl that once proudly hawked "Williams 8" jerseys and shirseys now stood absent any player, the omnipresent white, black and gray with the logo standing in while the team figures out what that means next. The crowd, too, had largely dispensed with Williams, or Johnson, or virtually any other Net in any kind of bulk. The most popular jersey I saw Wednesday night was Derrick Rose's 1, in the red and black colors of the road team.
The branding effort, of the Nets as champions, as the top destination in New York sports, has been scaled back dramatically. The stand that once sold sushi now sells beer. The bars around the arena where fans gathered played the Mets World Series game. Very little seemed to matter less than the outcome of the Nets game. Fans ever-so-slowly filtered back to their seats after a half in which the Nets played competitively against the Bulls, who themselves had just beaten LeBron James' Cavs.