Carter to be one of Brooklyn’s finest
Hall of Famer to have jersey retired in a building and city where he never played a home game
Congratulations to Vince Carter, who is finally getting his jersey retired. It must mean a lot to the fan base, surely. He must have meant a lot to the franchise that had a pretty lousy history before and even after he was there. He must have left a mark.
Wait, hold on. We’re not talking about Toronto? Vince is getting his jersey retired by the Nets? The Brooklyn Nets? Located in Brooklyn, New York?
Vince, uh, never played for the Nets in Brooklyn. He was a New Jersey Net. They played in East Rutherford, where the arena staff always looked like they had been cast in a gritty, maybe heartfelt movie about a franchise at the crossroads of nowhere, stranded between a swamp and the highways and the Hackensack River. They were last in league merchandise sales when they tried to rename themselves as the Swamp Dragons, but the governor didn’t like the Meadowlands being called a swamp and the Nets voted against their own name change at the NBA board of governors.
Still, congrats. It does seems like a low bar, though, doesn’t it? Vince played just five seasons in New Jersey, versus seven as a Raptor. He sits third all-time in Nets field-goal attempts and points (behind Brook Lopez and Buck Williams), fourth in free-throw attempts (just ahead of Derrick Coleman, who once responded to a teammate missing practice after being spotted at a New York strip club by saying, “Whoop-de-damn-do”), seventh in assists (behind a guy named Darwin Cook) and eighth in minutes played, just behind Chris Morris, who once showed up to a Nets game with “Please” written on one sneaker and “trade me” written on the other.
In New Jersey, the Nets were a farcical franchise. They were an ABA power who sold Dr. J to Philadelphia to cover some money problems and then won one playoff series in their first 24 years in the NBA as a glorified Turnpike way stop. They once called a press conference to introduce a coach they hadn’t actually hired yet — Villanova icon Rollie Massimino — and he changed his mind a couple of hours before he was supposed to be announced. Jason Kidd’s wife once sat courtside and called out insults after getting their son to fetch Kidd’s second phone and finding girlfriends on it. It was, over the years, a rich and tattered tapestry.
Kidd dragged them to a pair of Finals against the Shaq-and-Kobe Lakers, and they were still chasing that high when they traded a bag of magic beans for Vince in 2004. In his first game back in Toronto, Vince hit the game-winner that the Nets showed him in their surprise jersey retirement video. That was a good moment for him.
But they didn’t get far. Vince’s Nets won 49 games (tied for second-most in franchise history!) and he played 82 games once (only the second and final time Vince did so) and reached the second round twice, including by beating the Raptors in 2007. That was the series where the Raptors organization made sure the fans had Raptors-red T-shirts for Game 1, and the Nets wore their Nets-red jerseys and won the series in six. Whoops.
That modest era of success ended without great incident, and Vince was long gone by the time the Nets moved to Brooklyn in 2012 as part of a Russian oligarch’s real-estate play, where superstars still come and go without accomplishing very much. They’ve exchanged the shambolic New Jersey experience for the superficial Brooklyn one.
And now that he’s a Hall of Famer, they’re honouring Vince. I asked Dave D’Alessandro, who covered the Nets for the Newark Star-Ledger, about Vince’s time there. Dave said Vince was a pro’s pro, trying to be great and falling just short, and then doing what Kidd wouldn’t: helping youngsters like Lopez and Devin Harris after Kidd left him stranded by the Turnpike. Former Nets president Rod Thorn would later say, “Carter saved us. He kept us competitive.”
Vince wasn’t like that here, of course. He peaked early and pouted to get out and his sheer longevity — third all-time in regular-season games played, for eight franchises — and cultural importance is what eventually got him to the Hall of Fame. Again, he’s the divorced dad of Canadian basketball, and the franchise has edged closer to Carter without going so far as to fully reconcile, yet. He’ll go into the Hall as a Raptor, of course, which was the only choice; team president Masai Ujiri has hinted at future team honours. Maybe Vince will get his jersey retired in Toronto as some kind of water-under-the-bridge closure, and maybe he won’t.
But New Jersey/Brooklyn has so little solid history to hold onto, so now Vince will get a truly weird jersey retirement in a building and city where he never played a home game. In a way, it’s a fitting footnote for a semi-vagabond franchise to honour part of what became a vagabond career. After all those years in the NBA, maybe it’s the closest Vince Carter ever found to a home.