BOSTON – The Nets all have experienced the full fury of fan wrath before. Hell, Rod Thorn used to feel it every day when he’d take the Metro North train down from Rye to his old midtown office when he was the NBA’s dean of discipline.
Every day he’d sit next to a stockbroker who would knowingly peer his eyes over the top of his neatly folded newspaper, or stand next to a construction worker with coffee stains all over his orange-and-blue Knicks sweatshirt.
Nobody ever was shy about sharing what was on his mind.
“After that Knicks-Heat series when the Knicks were up three games to one, then they had the fight, then I had to suspend all those players, yeah, people were angry as heck at me and they let me know all the time,” Thorn, the Nets general manager, said yesterday. “You either ignore it or you try to be polite to them, but sure, after a while you hear it so many times and it gets you mad, I won’t deny that at all.”
The Nets knew what they were in for last night, long before they took the FleetCenter floor for Game 3 of these Eastern Conference semifinals. For one thing, most of the Nets were here a year ago, when Celtics fans showered them with profanity, invective and worse, when the new arena went old-school on them, waking up all of the ugly, dormant Boston Garden ghosts.
If the Nets needed a reminder at all, all they needed to do was walk around the streets and avenues of Boston yesterday morning, where all around was the buzz of basketball, the simmering anger of citizens who’d been outed as rednecks and rowdies and drunks by the coach of the Nets – no matter how delicately Byron Scott tried to spin it later on – and a mad anticipation for an opportunity to exercise their First Amendment right to free speech.
“I think it’s disgraceful what that coach said,” one woman on the “T,” Boston’s subway system, said to no one in particular yesterday morning.
“I think it’s typical,” came the response from a lawyerly looking fellow. “I mean, let’s face it, the guy played for the Lakers.”
Bostonians long have lived down – and lived up – to their reputation as parochial, opinionated and passionate, and there was no reason to expect anything different last night. They just have new material now.
First, a beloved local columnist was smacked around for suggesting some of the very same things Celtics fans themselves were thinking – and saying – last year, and surely would have said this year.
Now Scott, breaking free from the straitjacket of self-restraint that had been strangling him since March, if even for a few liberating moments, has thrown kerosene onto the pyre.
“I’m not going to talk about that anymore,” Scott said yesterday morning, carefully following the company’s Lamoriello Guide to Keeping Your Bosses Happy manual.
Actually, given what awaited Scott and his team last night, he merely was being prudent. He’s felt his own share of fan anger, of course, certainly in this city when he was playing for the Lakers, but other times, too. He remembers in college, playing for Arizona State, visting such user-unfriendly places as Oregon State and New Mexico.
“Not only were the people right on you, which made you uncomfortable from a physical standpoint, but they were also so close that you could hear every word they said about you – and they seemed to know almost everything about you that was possible to know,” Scott said yesterday. “So that could shake you up a little bit if you were so inclined. But most good players play better, I find, when they’re faced with that kind of adversity.”
The Nets were certain to find out where they stood on that particular scale soon enough.
For better or for worse.
