The Nets Got to the Finals and I Still Have the Jersey

I grew up in Austin. My friends were Spurs fans. Every single one of them.

I don't have a clean origin story for why I ended up a Nets fan. No family connection, no relative from Newark who passed it down, no logical explanation. I just picked them. And then I spent years defending that choice to people who had Timmy and Tony and Manu and the whole beautiful Spurs machine running in their backyard while I was out here repping a team from New Jersey that nobody in Texas had strong feelings about — which made me the weird one in every conversation.

Being a fan of a team that nobody around you cares about is its own particular experience. There's no shared suffering. No one else is disappointed when your team loses because it was never their team to begin with. You carry it alone. That's the deal you make when you pick wrong geographically, and I made that deal without knowing what I was signing up for.

What Jason Kidd Built

Before I get to 2003, you need to understand what Jason Kidd did to that franchise.

The Nets were nothing before he got there. Lottery team, irrelevant, the kind of franchise you root for ironically. Kidd arrived in 2001 and turned them into an Eastern Conference champion in a single season. One year. He made everyone around him better in ways that are hard to quantify — Kerry Kittles, Richard Jefferson, Kenyon Martin, all of them elevated by the way he controlled a game. The Nets went to the Finals in 2002 and lost to Shaq and Kobe in four straight, which hurt, but that Lakers team was untouchable and we all knew it. Fine. You go back next year.

And they went back. That was the thing about that team — they just kept showing up.

But 2003 wasn't 2002. The team waiting on the other side wasn't the Lakers.

San Antonio, June 2003

The Spurs had Tim Duncan. Twenty-four points and seventeen rebounds per game in the Finals. I'm going to let that sit there for a second. Twenty-four and seventeen, against a Nets team that played hard and competed and couldn't do anything about it because you cannot do anything about Tim Duncan when he's locked in. He is an immovable object in human form and he was in his absolute prime in 2003.

I watched every game with people who were rooting against me. Not against the Nets specifically — they genuinely didn't care about the Nets. They were rooting for San Antonio, for their team, and so by extension I was alone in every room. Game 1 went Spurs. Game 3 went Spurs.

Game 2 — we won. Jason Kidd was a different person in that game, willed that thing, and we won by two points. Game 4 — one point. One single point. We won by one and I went absolutely sideways in a room full of people who were now annoyed. For about 48 hours I let myself believe we were going to pull this off.

Then Game 5 happened. Then Game 6 happened.

Final: Spurs 4, Nets 2.

I sat in a room full of people celebrating. David Robinson got a championship in his final season. Tony Parker was unstoppable. Duncan was Duncan. Great story — for everyone except me.

The Jersey

Here's the part I can't fully explain.

After the series ended, I went and bought a Kenyon Martin jersey.

The team had just lost. The season was over. There was nothing to celebrate and no rational reason to spend money on merchandise from a team that had come up short. But I bought it anyway. I think I needed something tangible — something I could hold that said I was here, I cared about this, this wasn't nothing to me even if it didn't go the way I wanted.

K-Mart was the right choice for that. He wasn't the best player on the team. He wasn't the best player in the series. He wasn't going to win any awards. But he played like every possession personally offended him, like defense was a matter of pride and not just strategy, like no moment was too big to back down from. That's the kind of player you buy the jersey of when your team loses. Not the star. The guy who showed up and gave everything even when it didn't work out.

I still have it. Sitting in my house right now. Twenty-something years later.

I've thought about getting rid of it and I never do. It's a timestamp. A physical record of a specific feeling — being twenty years old, the only Nets fan in a room of Spurs fans, watching a team I loved fall short of something they deserved. You can't throw that away. That's part of who you are.

What That Team Was

The 2001-03 Nets went to back-to-back Finals. That doesn't happen. In the Eastern Conference during that stretch you had Milwaukee, Indiana, Detroit, Philly — real teams with real rosters. The Nets beat all of them, twice over, and showed up on the biggest stage the sport has.

They ran into two dynasty-level teams both times. The 2002 Lakers swept them. The 2003 Spurs beat them 4-2. There's no shame in that ledger. Those were the best teams in basketball. Losing to them doesn't mean you weren't good enough — it means you ran out of miracles at the right time.

It still hurt. It hurt in a way that compound-interest accumulates when you're carrying it alone, when everyone in your zip code is on the other side.

Still Here

The Nets aren't in New Jersey anymore. They're in Brooklyn now with different colors and a different identity and nothing about them looks like the team I fell in love with. I've watched them chase championships and blow up rosters and make decisions that made no sense and do all the things that teams do when they're trying to find their way.

I'm still here. That's not a choice you revisit. You just are or you aren't.

I was a Nets fan in 2003 in a room full of Spurs fans, and I bought the jersey after we lost, and I kept it. That's about as clear a statement of fandom as I know how to make.

— AWK