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The Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center take a few hits, some more deserved than others. (Arena's neither best nor worst, IMO.) But the team's fortunes have changed.

So, at #9 among New York Magazine's "39 Reasons to Love New York, Right Now," dated 12/5/22 but written sometime before then, is "Because the Knicks have something to smile about (the Nets)."

Indeed, the Nets went through a truly awful news cycle starting in late October--and that's not even mentioning the rumored (but not enacted) hiring of Coach Ime Udoka, suspended after leading the Boston Celtics to the NBA Finals, for workplace violations described as an affair with a staffer.

Zak Cheney-Rice writes:
A clear sign that your basketball team is having a bad season is if the head coach gets fired and fans start wearing FIGHT ANTISEMITISM T-shirts because of the star point guard’s taste in conspiracy theories. In the case of the Brooklyn Nets, it’s all in a day’s work — literally: Steve Nash got the axe and Kyrie Irving sank to new depths of infamy in the same 24 hours in November.
Sure, and the high hopes for the Nets last year imploded with Kyrie Irving's anti-vax posture kept him out of home games.

On the way back

However, since Jacque Vaughn took over as coach and then Irving returned after an eight-game suspension, the Nets have won steadily, eight of the last nine, climbing above their rivals in the standings. 

So the Knicks' Schadenfreude may be short-lived. In other words, in sports, the vibe can change. As Adam Zagoria wrote 12/13/22 on NJ.com, "How the once-dysfunctional Nets got their groove back."

Another metric: the Nets rank (by percent) 11th in the league in home attendance, at 98.3%, and 15th in the league in road attendance, so arguably they're competing well with the Knicks, who draw a smaller percentage in both categories, but more total fans to a larger home venue. (We don't know the number of freebies the Nets give out.)

It's hard not to be cynical about the Nets: the team's much-ballyhooed "culture"--remember that mantra?--has clearly imploded in the era of player empowerment and win-now executives+owners. But fans will show up for entertaining basketball, and the Nets can provide that.

As Alex Schiffer wrote in The Athletic yesterday, the Nets next week will play three top teams: the Golden State Warriors, Milwaukee Bucks, and Cleveland Cavaliers. Two wins might suggest they're a contender--though the team still lacks some roster pieces and is vulnerable to its stars running down from too many minutes.

A rant on Barclays

Why Barclays Center is the worst arena in America, wrote "Abe_Beame," a pseudonymous contributor (named for New York City's less-than-beloved mayor during the 1970s fiscal crisis) to SBNation on 12/8/22, with the subheading, "The Barclays Center is the perfect representation of the Brooklyn Nets, and not in the way the franchise hoped."
 
Well, note this comment on Twitter, "I don’t like Barclays Center but most of these points are bad and I’ve been to worse arenas."

Indeed, it's more fanpost rant, half-baked at best. Sure, Barclays is not as "special" as once claimed--and the lower bowl's far more comfortable than the upper one--but it's hardly the worst arena. 

A quick survey of crowdsourced assessments on Yelp: Barclays Center, 3.5 stars; Madison Square Garden, 4 stars; Prudential Center Newark, 3.5 stars; UBS Center, 3 stars; Wells Fargo Center Philadelphia, 3.5 stars; TD Garden Boston, 3.5 stars.

Traffic and more

Take traffic. Barclays relies, more than most, on public transit, which several defenders pointed out.

I've argued that, given the arena's tight fit, everything needs to work--including enforcement of illegal parking and idling--and it doesn't, which means that an arena that relies on public transit still inflicts unfair hardship on neighbors. 

But that doesn't mean that, as "Beame" suggests, the Barclays Center should be blamed for the bottleneck caused by excessive delivery orders, and steady double-parking across Flatbush Avenue outside Shake Shack and Chik-fil-A (not, as sloppily written Chick-Fil-A). That's on the city, just as the city should enforce violations during arena events.

And no, Walter O’Malley did not want "to move his baseball team from Ebbets Field to this very site, over a train yard at the Atlantic terminal," but rather nearby. The arena sits partly on a former piece of the MTA's Vanderbilt Yard, but also on the mixed-use block of Pacific Street, with that streetbed demapped. (Also, a piecce of Fifth Avenue was absorbed.)

Yes, Robert Moses warned of a traffic disaster, but a larger baseball stadium in a different era is not quite the same thing. (He and other city officials also didn't want to subsidize a new stadium the way Los Angeles would.)

The arena impact

Did Barclays, as the writer contends, come "to the city as a colonizer, an imposing, gentrifying force that expects the city to bend around its whims"? Sort of.

After all, the arena operators get to cordon off purported public space for paying customers, and the latest operator, billionaire Joe Tsai, has proven adept at commandeering ever more pieces of the arena exterior for advertising or promotional purposes.

More importantly, and unmentioned by the writer--he's a snippy basketball fan--the arena was sold to the people of Brooklyn as part of a project to fight gentrification by delivering jobs, job training, and affordable housing. As noted, benefits were overpromised and underdelivered.

But that doesn't make the "stadium"--no, an arena--"a miserable hub, an albatross." I see it more as a symbol of a project that got a significant amount of public support--including direct subsidies, tax breaks, free land, and eminent domain--without delivering on its promises, which included developing the below-grade "blighted" railyards.

About the fans

As the writer's critics quickly pointed out, their fanbase is not "composed entirely of Brooklyn LIU freshman, trust fund kids, and former Upper East Side yuppies." That's just dumb--the fan base is fairly diverse.

That said, fandom's not deeply entrenched, so going to Barclays when the Nets play the Boston Celtics will bring out more passionate Celtics fans (who, I'm sure, aren't that diverse either).

About the team

Yes, the new Brooklyn Nets did mortgage their future with a terrible trade for aging Celtics stars circa 2013, and the Celtics drafted cornerstone stars who've helped the team reach the top of the league.

And yes, the Nets swerved from developing diamonds-in-the-rough to indulging superstars who came by free agency may be "another perfect reflection of how the franchise has approached building a community and a fanbase in Brooklyn."

But that's not a direct critique of the arena--except in the sense that a high-priced team can justify higher-priced tickets that can help pay off arena debt. And, of course, the team is playing better now.

Reasons for cynicism

Is glomming onto Biggie Smalls and Jean-Michel Basquiat, for banners and design, cynical, as the writer suggests? Sure. 

Is it similar to what other teams do? That too.

Are the concessions credited to Brooklyn businesses "essentially licensing deals" rather than genuine pop-up indy operations? Sure, though we've known that from the start, and that's standard procedure at venues. (That deserved more acknowledgment during the breathless praise for the arena food a decade ago.)

Among the comments

Commenting on SB Nation, one supporter called the arena "a great success for the surrounding neighborhoods"--depends whom you ask-- and "the traffic is not bad." (Depends on the game.)
Created a lot of jobs? Well, not nearly as many as hyped. 
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