MADISON Square Garden sits a few days away from beginning its second month of playoff inactivity, and it’s hard to tell what the old lady sees when she peers out across the Hudson and locks eyes with the building at which she used to look down her nose.
Does the Garden feel like Greg Brady, that time Bobby beat him in the pull-up contest? How about Mike Maddux, watching his kid brother, Greg, paint the black all the way to four Cy Young Awards while he craned his neck pitching batting practice all those years? Or, maybe, the all-time stepped-on, put-upon, overlooked big brother, Fredo Corleone.
MSG: “I was your older brother and I was stepped over.”
Meadowlands: “That’s the way Pop wanted it.”
MSG: “It ain’t the way I wanted it!”
Yes, of all the miseries that have befallen the world’s self-appointed most famous arena, this has to qualify as the all-time weekend from hell. Worse than the mid-’70s and early ’80s, when a variety of lame Rangers teams and sorry Knicks teams had to peer over that other river, all the way out to Long Island, where the Nets were winning two ABA titles and the Islanders were hoisting four straight Stanley Cups.
At least those neighbors had the common courtesy not to pile on.
The Jersey Boys, though, they aren’t quite as hospitable. And so when the Nets inevitably join the Cup Finals-bound Devils in the championship round of their tournament, the fans of New York City are going to have to swallow hard and close their eyes and maybe take a shovelful of sugar to make this most bitter medicine go down.
Nine short years after the Rangers and Knicks kept the Garden’s lights on all the way to the end of June in an unforgettable tag team of championship aspirations, the poor cousins across the Hudson are doing the same trick. And they seem bound and determined to take that old parlay one step forward: two titles, one address, and one future have-to-see-it-to-believe-it sign that would surely soon grace the highways and byways connecting the outside world to the Meadowlands:
“Welcome to East Rutherford, N.J., Titletown, USA.”
“I think what it tells you is that New Jersey’s got a heck of a lot to cheer for because they have two awfully good teams,” Byron Scott said yesterday morning, a few hours before his Nets tried to finish the job against the Pistons, ending these Eastern Conference Finals in a walkover and joining their corporate brethren in the Finals. “I think that’s a big feather in the cap of the fans around here, and the people who run both these teams.”
Now, much the same way Patrick Ewing and Mark Messier weren’t exactly bridge partners in that fabled spring band summer of ’94, the Nets and Devils haven’t shared much quality time together at YankeeNet company picnics. Not one Net admitted to having seen a Devils game in person this year, even though Jason Kidd is seen exhorting the Devils during one of those endless break-in-the-action video screams at the hockey games.
“I watch ’em on TV, though,” said Richard Jefferson, a native of Arizona, which is likely never to be confused with Saskatchewan as a hockey hotbed. “I was happy to see that they beat Ottawa and made the Finals. For a long time, the Devils were the only thing Jersey could hang its hat on, before Jason Kidd came here, before the rest of us arrived. It’s great to see them keep it up.”
Great, depending on where you sit, of course. From Teaneck to Totowa, Mahwah to Morristown, this truly is a marvelous coup, especially after years of hearing thousands of lame Jersey jokes. In the office of Lou Lamoriello, the Machiavelli of the Meadowlands who may be entering his last great victory lap as a boss, these are also heady days.
Of course, inside the Garden, there aren’t a lot of laughs these days, though whenever you hear one, it echoes for about six hours inside the empty arena. It’s time to ready the Canyon of Heroes for a busy couple of weeks. Not the one on Lower Broadway. The one on Paterson Plank Road.