Say what you will about Jersey drivers, Jersey girls and Jersey's smell, but there's no doubt that across the river is where we'll have basketball worth watching, as well as affordable and available tickets.
The Nets come into the season one of four teams in the East worth watching, along with the Pacers, Pistons and the newly retooled Heat. With Jason Kidd, Vince Carter and Richard Jefferson healthy, the Nets should continue to run one of the league's prettiest and most efficient fast breaks.
The team succeeds or fails, though, with its half-court and transition defense under grind-it-out head coach Lawrence Frank. Last year's Nets were a pace team, among the bottom five in the league for both points scored and points allowed, meaning they tended to eat up as much of the shot clock as possible in each possession and force opponents to do the same.
They have the luxury of playing in the Atlantic, basketball's weakest division, along with the Celtics, Knicks, Sixers and Raptors—teams that must overachieve to reach mediocrity.
Nets GM Ed Stefanski and president Rod Thorn have put together the sort of team Isiah Thomas claims to—not just three stars, but versatile backups and role players to support that talent. This may seem like a given after the last few season, but recall the despair when new owner Bruce Ratner moved Kenyon Martin to Denver. The consensus was that Ratner wouldn't bother to improve the team until they moved to Brooklyn, if even then, since he bought the Nets to facilitate his railyards land grab.
While Brown struggles to get the Knicks misaligned and underwhelming roster into the playoffs (not much to brag about in a league where more teams make the playoffs than are left out), the Nets are a much better bet to make a real run.
A quick look at the rest of the conference: Hollander is right—the Knicks are a mismatched group of talents put together by a clumsy GM. We'll see how long until coach Larry Brown jumps ship, pleading health reasons.
No one will realize how good Paul Pierce can be if he continues to play for such a bad and boring team. And Doc Rivers, an awfully classy guy, has shown as little coaching ability since coming to Boston as he did in his previous gig in Orlando.
Everyone realizes how good Allen Iverson is, but Chris Webber has always been a Rasheed Wallace–type player with the skills to be the go-to guy but not the desire. He has yet to click with Iverson's low-percentage, high-scoring style of ball. Maurice Cheeks has his work cut out for him figuring out how to make the 76ers a team around Iverson, a great individual player who can't coexist with other co-equal or even half-comparable talents.
Rumor has it that Toronto remains in the league, but we received no confirmation by press time.
