Michael Ray.
I remember when the Knix suddenly had Michael Ray and Ray Williams and things were looking very promising, after a post-championship slump.
I was young and primarily a Nets fan, before they moved to the inconvenient Swamp and their games were on Sportschannel which wasn't on our cable Tv.
Cable was a nascent enterprise back in the late 70's. One neighborhood a couple blocks away got the first experimental cable in our area circa 1977. They actually buried the cables underground and put this large central heating sized green metal unit on my friends lawn. I think they got cable for free or a reduced charge for allowing the cable/utility eyesore on their property. Their cable had Sportschannel where the Nets could be seen. It wasn't until I think 1979 or perhaps 1980 that the rest of our NJ burb got cabled up, with the wires of course utilizing the existing telephone poles.
Thus we had MSG and the Knix available, and no Nets games. So I became a Knick fan. I had been following anyway, and when Bernard came from NJ to NY (circuitously) that sealed the deal. And as I got into my mid-teens, you could just hop a train and be right at MSG in 45 minutes. Usually you could buy a $10 ticket last minute. Once we were 15 minutes late with the box office closed and an usher just let us in for free! Games were not sold out.
To get to the Meadowlands required a car. And though I was an enterprising 15 year old, I wasn't up for stealing and hotwiring cars just to see a crappy basketball team. Ze Nets really took themselves out of play. They were hard to see -- really impossible for me -- on TV. I think they got some decent-for-the-time TV deal, but then half the state or more couldn't see them. And they exiled themselves to a far corner of the state, where there was little else to do. I never saw a Nets game at the Meadowlands, after hitting maybe 8 games a year for 3 years at the Piscataway RAC. While their NYK rivals were accessible by public transportation and on cable TV.
If anyone was ever wondering why the Nets never really developed much of a fan base and connection to NJ ... they didn't really try.
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