New Yorkers {heart} Winners, but the Nets?

NEW YORK -- Doormats. Whipping boys. Chumps.

Ever since they joined the NBA, the New Jersey Nets have played second fiddle to the New York Knicks, the dominant team in the country’s largest media market. They have suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous New Yorkers, who ridiculed them as losers.

Until now.

As the championship series between the Nets and the Los Angeles Lakers shifts tonight to the Meadowlands, in a drafty arena built on a swamp in East Rutherford, the Big Apple’s once-haughty fans are facing the unthinkable: New Jersey actually has a decent basketball team.

“Give them credit; they’ve come a long way,” sniffed Lawrence “Larry Legend” D’Earcy, lacing up his shoes for a game at Greenwich Village’s West 4th Street court, an asphalt temple where pickup players from across the nation come to live, breathe and bleed basketball.

“It’s just hard for me as a New Yorker to admit this,” D’Earcy added, “because the Nets were so lousy for so long. This year, the tables turned on us like crazy.”

To understand the discomfort many here feel, imagine how Los Angeles would react if the Lakers imploded and the Los Angeles Clippers, whose very name is synonymous with failure, suddenly vaulted into the NBA finals. At least L.A. fans would be more than vaguely aware of the Clippers, who play in the same downtown arena as the Lakers.

It’s a different world here. Although the Nets’ Continental Airlines Arena is only 10 miles from Madison Square Garden, where the Knicks have played since 1968, it might as well be 1,000 miles distant, given the vast gulf separating the two teams.

Many Knicks fans, to put it mildly, would rather watch Boston Celtics highlight films than travel to games in New Jersey. Their team has a long history of winning and a cocky courtside manner, even though its last NBA title came nearly 29 years ago.

The Nets, by contrast, have never snared an NBA championship and have only rarely had winning seasons. And the fact that the team is down 2-0 against the Lakers isn’t helping New Yorkers find this enthusiasm.

“I wouldn’t go to the Meadowlands; it’s much too hard to get out there and it feels very far away,” said author David Halberstam, who has written about the NBA. “The Nets are a good team, but where they play has been the black hole of basketball for so long. They’ve been stigmatized for us.”

Other New Yorkers put it more bluntly.

“The whole state of New Jersey is a joke,” scoffed Don Passinkoff, a retired high school English teacher who still plays pickup games with guys a third his age. “But who knew their team would catch fire?”

Certainly not the Nets. As recently as last year, the desultory, snake-bitten outfit won 31 games and lost 51. They have been plagued by poor business decisions, boneheaded trades, a rash of crippling injuries and a streak of bad luck reaching from Paterson to Pennsauken.

Few enjoyed playing in East Rutherford. An unhappy Net once stenciled “Trade Me” on his sneakers before every game. To be sure, some NBA stars, including Julius Erving, Rick Barry and Jayson Williams, were once part of the organization. (But even some of that shine seemed to wear off Friday when Williams pleaded not guilty in a New Jersey courtroom to charges that he fatally shot his bodyguard.)

Most telling, the team never felt that the New Jersey community fully supported it. Not like New York loves the Knicks.

“The Nets arena was like one of those stupid sound studios and you could hear everything because it was so empty,” wrote former all-star center Williams in his 2000 memoir, “Loose Balls: Easy Money.”

“Once some joker got hold of the loudspeaker system somehow and said, ‘Will the lady who lost five children please claim them. They’re beating the Nets 70 to 65.’ ”

Times have changed. This weekend, the Nets will play the Lakers before a sold-out house. Local sports shops are doing a brisk business in Nets jerseys, and talk radio is boiling over with brash predictions of a home team upset.

In true New Jersey style, local newspaper columnists are bristling with indignation over how the world sees them. “Laugh, L.A.--Nets Don’t Mind,” read the headline over a recent Newark Star-Ledger column from Mike Vaccaro.

From Los Angeles, Vaccaro wrote: “Out here, we are viewed with amusement, as just another set of droll characters helping to break up the monotony of another perfect 78-degree day. We all wear headbands like Springsteen, circa 1984. We awls tawk like Carmela Soprano, circa 2001.”

As Nets fan Ken Daube picked up tickets last week at the Meadowlands sports arena for Sunday night’s game, he said the sold-out crowd was something new for the team. Typically, fans have been able to buy prime seats minutes before a game, often for less than face value. Crowds of 5,000 to 7,000 have been common throughout the team’s lackluster years, he said.

This year, he added, the Garden State finally has the upper hand. New Yorkers “will have to make peace with our team, because it plays well,” Daube said. “But I don’t think they’ll ever make peace with Jersey.”

Win or lose, the Nets may have trouble getting fans’ attention this weekend. The NBA game is competing with other events, including the San Francisco Giants and Barry Bonds at Yankee Stadium, the final leg of horse racing’s triple crown at Belmont Park, the Tyson-Lewis boxing match and the Stanley Cup hockey finals.

“There’s no big thrill because the Nets aren’t rivals to the Knicks; they usually don’t play well against New York,” complained Bernard “Mr. B” Chong, a regular at the 4th Street court. “I’m not on the edge of my seat.”

His views were echoed by others at the small court known as “the Cage,” which is surrounded by a 20-foot high chain-link fence. Asked about the NBA finals, most shrugged, offered grudging praise to the Nets and grumbled about the Knicks’ losing season.

“I don’t know too many people here who ever followed New Jersey,” said Daniel Valladares, waiting to play. “I mean, as a team, they could never reach us.”

The Nets have certainly tried. A succession of owners experimented with marketing gimmicks and promotional campaigns to tap into the huge New York metropolitan market, with limited success. Indeed, the team began to improve its financial fortunes when it made a decision five years ago to de-emphasize New York and focus on developing a New Jersey fan base.

That campaign, recounted in “Marketing Outrageously” by Jon Spoelstra, a former Nets president and marketing guru, was nothing if not colorful. At one point, the team hired two sumo wrestlers to pose as mascots and race through the arena at halftime. The most provocative idea, ultimately shelved, involved a giveaway dreamed up by ad executive George Lois.

“George recommended that we hand out jockstraps to every man, woman and child who came to our home games,” Spoelstra wrote. “You would get a jockstrap every time you came through the turnstile. If you went to our full slate of 41 home games, you would have 41 jockstraps.”

It was an outrageous idea, he conceded. But to compete with the Knicks and gain fan attention, Spoelstra said, New Jersey had to get tough.

Some New Yorkers have finally been won over, but it may have nothing to do with the Nets themselves.

True Love, a veteran at the Cage, says he’ll be watching the big game tonight and rooting for that team across the river.

“It’s not that I like New Jersey, because they got a long way to go to impress me,” Love explained. “It’s that I hate L.A. even more.”