Do it for the culture: The Nets need a rebrand worthy of the city they represent
July 12, 2013. That marks the official date Brooklyn made the infamous trade with Boston, and then-Nets GM, Billy King burned down his team’s future like Nero on the Palatine Hill.
In trying to construct an instant title contender, Brooklyn hitched its wagon to a group of thoroughbreds that were a few steps away from the glue factory. At the time, the team looked too big to fail. It’s been over four years since that Faustian, win-now folly jumpstarted the Nets’ descent into the NBA abyss and laid the building blocks for the Celtics’ linear success and war chest of assets.
Recent seasons found the Nets stuck in the moribund purgatory of present haplessness and future hopelessness. The only thing they led the league in was being generally awful. The majority of the roster consisted of ninth men masquerading as starters and rotation players. Now entering the final year of their draft death-sentence, you can see the light at the end of their abeyant tunnel.
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Sean Marks got named as general manager in February 2016 and inherited this losing hand. But he came in with a clear plan to execute a blueprint to respectability. He took his team’s only asset (unused cap space) and brought back talent and — albeit mediocre — draft capital.
Marks targeted the current market inefficiency: bad contracts signed in the treat yoself free agent summer of 2016. He utilized Brooklyn’s copious excess room to absorb them in order to attain either first round picks or underachieving players from recent lotteries — a savvy strategy to deploy for a team lacking any meaningful trade pieces.
Snagging D’Angelo Russell was Marks’ smartest move so far. The point guard may have fallen out of favor and became expendable in L.A., but it wasn’t long ago that Magic Johnson called Russell a future superstar. Oh, and he’s still only 21 years old. A trade like this was the Brooklyn’s best chance to dig up a franchise cornerstone from a mound of dirt clots.
The Nets, for the most part, do not have an illustrious past. Save for a few years in the early-aughts, the franchise ranged from listless to downright terrible. In their 41 years in the NBA, they managed to make the playoffs less than half the time and only reached the finals twice, never winning it all.
Their move to Brooklyn from New Jersey came with a rebranding, complete with reinvigorated logo and color scheme. But the braintrust stopped one step short of a full tear down. They should have left behind a mostly-forgettable history and started fresh with a new team name. Maybe they were afraid a scorched-earth approach would have burned their links to the past. But if it meant ditching that insipid moniker, they should have torched those links to light their path going forward.
New York City is one of the coolest places on the planet and Brooklyn, especially, makes it so. It’s edgier than Manhattan and hipper than Queens. The NBA is definitely the coolest sports league. The team representative of the borough should reflect both those things. Having ‘Nets’ as your team name has all the flavor of corrugated cardboard and is the lamest the association has to offer by far.
Luckily, this is an easily fixable problem. It’s just a matter of landing on the right solution.
They can always bring back their mascot and make the effortless pivot to the Brooklyn Knights. It provides a play on words and the team’s initials would double as the borough’s abbreviation. The thing is though, nobody really liked the short-lived, much-maligned Brooklyn Knight during his two-year reign of terror. He was an ominous figure who drove around a creepy van. Hard pass on anything that would reintegrate that monster into society.
The Brooklyn Bridges. It’s different, it’s alliterative, and it’s unique to the location. Brooklyn is situated at the onset of Long Island and the only way to get there by car is by crossing a bridge (unless you’re coming from the east). The borough houses nine bridges in total, including the eponymous one that serves as an icon of New York City. Bridges are meant to be bastions of stability and, uh, bridge the gaps between people and places. This idea’s better, but still not great. As integral as they are to society, nobody really gets jazzed up about infrastructure.
Brooklyn deserves something better. It’s always been a progressive site and a haven for creatives — from Walt Whitman to Christopher Wallace. It’s a place rich in history, diversity, and culture, and its team’s title should be tethered to the deep roots of the area. So I dug into the storied past of the borough. As a relatively new Brooklynite myself, I also figured learning about my new digs would do me well.
What I found out was the district played an essential role in the American Revolution. It was home to one of the country’s first free black communities and provided refuge during World War II. All interesting and fun facts and definitely things to be proud of.
Then, a part of its history jumped out at me. During the Civil War, Brooklyn had a volunteer militia known as the 14th Regiment. It was a particularly badass battalion, made up of abolitionists from the area:
"“During the war, the men of the 14th Brooklyn were well known by both armies and throughout the country for their hard drill, hard fighting, and constant refusal to stand down from a fight. During their three years of service they never withdrew from battle in unorderly fashion.”"
They got nicknamed the ‘red-legged devils’ because of their bright red pants and relentless mentality. They even became a favorite troop division of President Lincoln.
That sort of attitude and mindset is something to get behind. So I propose this: the Brooklyn Union. The word itself is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a confederation of independent individuals for some common purpose”…such as winning basketball games! It emanates strength and fortitude while paying homage to yesteryear. It also signifies the area’s confluent patchwork quilt of countless ethnicities, blanketed under the parameters of one borough.
As a player, wouldn’t you have a little bit of an extra rush with the oh-so-perfect pregame pump-up montages and knowing what you’d be representing? As a fan, who wouldn’t want to be a part of the Brooklyn Union army? Not to mention, the merchandise would practically sell itself.
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So to the Nets’ ownership: you’re on the right track, but take the final step in remaking your team. That desire to capture the fandom of the city would come by embracing your current surroundings. Building a champion might first start with being a symbol of winning and beacon of toughness. Scrap the insentient sobriquet for something derived from purpose and vigor — two commodities Brooklyn always possessed. Please…just do it for the culture.