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| Jay-Z just put the lights out on the Brooklyn Nets. (Credits: Vibe Magazine) |
If you haven't heard it Jay-Z dropped a song called "Open Letter," in which he made some references to the Brooklyn Nets that could be taken in a plethora of ways. Here's the song and the specific lyric I'm referring too.
"Woulda brought the Nets to Brooklyn for free
Except I made millions off it, you f**cking dweeb
I still own the building, I’m still keeping my seats
Y'all buy that bulls**t, you better keep y'all receipt."
Now this pretty much directly coincides with the report that Jay-Z is selling his minute stake in the team. With that being said, there are several ways you could look at this situation. One, maybe he wants to focus in on his new Roc Nation agency and selling the Nets will give him back some more capital. Two, maybe he's done his duty to the borough of Brooklyn by bringing them a team that he thinks represents the pride and swagger associated with the BK. So selling his ownership of the Nets won't even matter. Or three, this whole Nets thing was an absolute debacle. The tone of this song makes me believe the latter might just be reality.
Here's how I read it. Jay clearly picked up the bare minimum ownership years ago to bring the Nets to Brooklyn, that's undebatable. From there on we don't know what happened. Yeah, he and owner Mikhail Prokhorov talked a lot of smack in the past few years and stole a few Knicks fans. Yeah, he and the Russian Mogul threw up billboards of Deron Williams right near MSG to get under James Dolan's skin. Yeah, he tweeted out that the "City is under new management," when the Nets won the inaugural "Battle of the Boroughs." Blah blah blah. How could you not expect HOV to bring his "I'm confident, not cocky" attitude to owning the Nets? Yet, this team hasn't exactly lived up to the hype these two guys were providing over the last few years. Only over the last few weeks have the Nets had any semblance of a pulse. But Gerald Wallace has disappeared, Kris Humphries is still a joke and Joe Johnson is battling some nagging injuries. On top of that, the Nets have watched their crosstown rivals go off on a 13-game, national-attention grabbing win streak that have rendered Brooklyn almost completely irrelevant even with a decent stretch of its own.
So is HOV mad? Yeah, I think he is. I think he's disappointed in the way this whole move to Brooklyn went. I think he's disappointed that not more Brooklynites(Brooklyners, whatever) have switched allegiances from the Knicks to the Nets. I don't think he likes the team. And most importantly, the degree of which he's lost some of his love from New Yorkers has truly irked him. He's drawn the ire of Knicks fans with some of his comments and the way he thought he was just going to tear down the tradition of Madison Square Garden and the Knicks franchise. People don't like when you knock a deep-rooted tradition in the way he has, no matter who he may be. HOV just doesn't run New York like he used to.
Maybe his reaction to this newfound public disdain is very similar to the way people tore LeBron to pieces in that failure of a first season in Miami. LeBron acted with a bitter arrogance which only added to fire to already blazing flame within public opinion. It looks this way with HOV. Jay doesn't just come out randomly and release songs unless he has a legitimate reason to. Yes, this is just one song and one lyric within a song, but if you know HOV, you know this is real. We get it that Jay-Z has a better life than us "dweebs" and we get that you brought that alien mothership of an arena to Brooklyn; we get that you're still one of the most powerful African-Americans on the planet.
But you know what else we're starting to figure out? That we just won. Yeah, it might be a small battle in the grand scheme of things. Yet for Knicks fans? No, for Knicks fans this is a glorious victory.
You don't know what you're...doing...doing...doing.
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