The New Jersey Nets troll James Dolan
If you haven’t already guessed, the Knicks 2009-10 regular season was another losing one with the Knicks winning only 29 games. But that doesn’t mean that they didn’t give us plenty of other things to discuss.
On June 30, 2010, the Knicks organization denied complaining to the league about a billboard featuring New Jersey Nets owners Jay-Z and Mikhail Prokhorov that was put up just a stone’s throw from the Garden. For those of us who haven’t been to New York City, follow this link to see that this billboard was literally in Dolan’s backyard.
Okay, do we honestly believe that the Knicks organization didn’t complain to the league about the billboard?
Since the decision to relocate the Nets from New Jersey to Brooklyn had been made all the way back in 2004, James Dolan may have started to feel like the move maybe wouldn’t happen at all. As we now know, the team would officially become the Brooklyn Nets in 2012.
The billboard was the ultimate way to troll Dolan. It must have been an all too-close-to-home reminder that the end of the Knicks’ monopoly over the New York City NBA market was imminent.
The Nets’ message that they planned to provide a team worth cheering for, an alternate option to disenfranchised fans of the New York Knicks was an obvious one. But there was an additional and much more subtle message in the ad and it had to do with LeBron James’ upcoming free agency.
Both the Nets and Knicks would make a play for LeBron James and the Nets apparently felt that the Knicks’ weren’t taking seriously their bid to land the superstar. The billboard would have been a reminder that Jay-Z and James were buddies and there had been speculation for some time that the two might parlay that friendship into an owner/player relationship with the Nets.