I was born and raised in Manhattan, just a couple years before the New Jersey Nets leapt directly from the basement to consecutive NBA Finals appearances. I remember Mikki Moore as my power forward, not Kenyon Martin, and I never experienced or felt particularly connected to the Jersey Pride dripping off the best Nets teams of the early 2000s.

I understand now that was a perfect marriage between franchise and fanbase, if not economically, then spiritually. The nation’s most insecure state embraced a small-market team that always beat the Knicks and Celtics, whose success was repeatedly name-checked in The Sopranos, but remained firmly the underdog. The team started winning after they traded the “selfish,” NYC-born Stephon Marbury for Jason Kidd, who ran — what else? — the Princeton offense dutifully. And thanks to the league’s best defense, Kidd got to throw plenty of dazzling, no-look passes in transition.

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The Nets were tough, fundamentally sound, and flashy, in that order. New Jersey’s self-conscious pride swelled, and shows you how weak the Eastern Conference is became the NBA equivalent of it’s just a highway surrounded by factories.

You likely know the rest of the story, but if not, Secret Base has a refresher on the rest of the Jersey years…

Now they are the Brooklyn Nets, playing their home games at Barclays Center, which sits on the edge of Prospect Heights. Bruce Ratner’s vision, in part, came true. Today, Barclays Center — unlike the Nets’ previous homes — is reliably full even when the team isn’t good, this year reporting an average attendance of 17,404 per game, or 99.18% of its listed capacity.

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Most of those 17,404 are not Nets fans. If a star player like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Giannis Antetokounmpo is on the visiting team — not to mention the LeBron James/Steph Curry class — the building bursts with their jerseys. This is also true for regional opponents like the Boston Celtics and New York Knicks, boasting huge fanbases that always travel well. Earlier this season, Jaylen Brown got “M-V-P” chants at the ’Clays.

Obviously, the Nets have been very bad over the last three seasons. They no longer have star-power on the roster. It’s no secret that the franchise’s move to Brooklyn only brought them deeper into Knicks-occupied territory, but the current state of the team plays a role here too.

Former Nets Bruce Brown and Theo Pinson described the crowd dynamic very well on the latter’s podcast a couple years ago…

Dealing with a busted bracket?

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Speaking about the 2021 playoff environment: “Their fans just love basketball. They’re there for the game. Like sometimes, it’s not for just Brooklyn, they’re just there for the game … They want to see a good basketball game. They want to see dunks, they’ll cheer for anybody, they don’t care who team you on.”

D’Angelo Russell echoed the sentiment last season: “They’re ready to just blow the roof off this place if you give them a reason. That may be for the opposing team, they may give them that reason a lot of the time. Or we can.”

When the Nets were briefly a winning team led by recognizable superstars, the crowd was behind them. They also attracted more young fans in the Clean Sweep years, namely their most impressionable targets: the children of millennial transplants.

But whether the Brooklyn Nets are good or bad at any given moment hardly affects the wider conversation about their fanbase…