Joe Tsai looked at what the Knicks have built and used the word most owners hire people to avoid. In a recent interview, the Nets owner called New York's title run "embarrassing" to his franchise. Not disappointing. Not a challenge. Embarrassing.
I love it. Not because it fixes anything, because it doesn't, but because it is the rarest thing in this league: an owner saying out loud what the fan base has been saying in the group chat for years. The Nets share a city with a team that just went on the run Brooklyn was built to go on, and the man who signs the checks refuses to pretend it stings any less than it does.
The context is what gives the quote its weight. Brooklyn moved across the river in 2012 and opened Barclays Center with the loudest possible promise, and the banner still isn't there. The franchise's only championships came in the ABA, 1974 and 1976, when Julius Erving was the best player alive and the Nets played on Long Island. In the NBA, they have two Finals appearances, 2002 and 2003 with Jason Kidd running the best transition offense in basketball, and two losses to teams that were simply better. Then Tsai took full control in 2019 and bought the swing that was supposed to end it: Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving, eventually James Harden, a superteam that never reached a conference finals. Checked the almanac. The closest they came was Game 7 in Milwaukee in 2021, Durant's foot on the line at the buzzer, two inches from a series win and a very different decade.
So when the neighbors finally break through, an owner who spent that much and got that little is allowed to be embarrassed. What comes next is the harder part. The words cost nothing. The rebuild costs everything, and Brooklyn is in the phase where you collect young players and draft equity and hope one of them turns into the guy. That's the tell I'm watching: whether the honesty shows up in the roster decisions or just in the interviews.