Deron Williams getting a shot past Carmelo Anthony during the Nets' win over the Knicks Monday night. (Photo: Getty)

Back in high school, one of my favorite clothing staples was a Knicks jersey adorned with Latrell Sprewell’s number eight. I wistfully remembered this as I pulled a black jersey bearing the same digit from the rack in a Midtown Modell’s last month. This time, the number on my back would represent a player on a different team, Deron Williams, the star point guard of the nascent Brooklyn Nets.

My purchase of Mr. Williams’s jersey was the culmination of a painful decade-plus process in which I chose to abandon the basketball franchise I fervently rooted for throughout my childhood. Though the Knicks spent that period in an agonizing annual ritual of unsuccessful postseason runs, my defection wasn’t about the dearth of championships. Even when the Knicks of the ’90s lost, they were in contention—they were part of a zeitgeist that included Spike Lee’s trash-talking commercials and garish retro blue-and-orange gear. They weren’t winners, but the effort always made for a fun ride. No, my break with the team didn’t coincide with one of their heartbreaking early postseason exits; it began in 2000, when they unceremoniously traded my basketball idol, Patrick Ewing, the center who had been with the team for as long as I had conscious memories.

Mr. Ewing had stuck with the Knicks throughout his career, despite the organization’s repeated failure to assemble a championship-caliber team around him. His loyalty cost him a ring that other players with a fraction of his talent were able to earn in more healthy institutions, and yet as soon as age began to weaken his formidable frame, he was shipped out rather than being permitted to retire gracefully.

Despite my anger over the mistreatment of Mr. Ewing, I stayed true to the Knicks. For me, the straw that broke the camel’s back came a year later in 2001, when two of the team’s least dependable and most overpaid players, Allan Houston and Charlie Ward, made a series of shockingly anti-Semitic statements in the presence of a reporter at a team Bible-study session. As a Jewish guy from Brooklyn, I was disgusted.

In a fit of high-school rage, I created a “Knicks fan’s hit list,” and taped it to my bedroom wall. It included all of the people I held responsible for the series of indignities I had suffered while rooting for the team—from Mr. Ward and Mr. Houston to the back-office executives I blamed for, among other things, dumping Mr. Ewing, failing to draft hometown hero Ron Artest in 1999 and going years without signing a true starting point guard. I vowed not to support the team again until all the scoundrels on my list were gone from Madison Square Garden. Then I waited, always planning a return to Knicks fandom when the time was right.

Because of my time-out from cheering on the Knicks, I was a detached observer as Cablevision heir James Dolan took on a major management role and made a series of missteps that caused the team to vanish from postseason contention. Eventually, all the miscreants on my hit list moved on. The final holdout was Mr. Houston, who initially retired in 2005 and made an aborted comeback attempt with the team in 2008. Soon after, the Knicks seemed to be salvaging themselves from the hoops scrap heap with the signing of stars Amar’e Stoudemire (a Jew!) and Carmelo Anthony. Though I had long since stopped following basketball religiously, I began to very casually root for my old team again.

In 2010, with the legal battles over the Barclays Center finally finished, it became clear the Nets were definitely headed to my home borough. A major-league sports franchise in Brooklyn was something I had dreamed of as a child, but my enemies had been vanquished, and the idea of shifting my sports loyalties was hard to stomach.

Last year, along with many other New Yorkers, I was fully pulled back into the Knicks’ orbit as point guard Jeremy Lin led the team on an improbable and electrifying run. For the first time in over a decade, I even tried to go to a game. Alas, I found the home court at the Garden was sold out, inaccessible for less than $175.

Just when it seemed the Knicks were beginning to win back the hearts of Big Apple basketball fans, our hopes for the team were crushed when management made a series of baffling offseason moves that included losing the likable Mr. Lin and signing a slew of past-their-prime players, including convicted domestic abuser Jason Kidd.

Like all massive train wrecks, the Knicks’ self-destruction this past summer was utterly riveting. I devoured every bit of the coverage and, in the course of this masochistic sports-page reading, learned that one of the villains from my rogues’ gallery was still lurking around the locker room. Mr. Houston had since become the team’s general manager and was yet again participating in the ruination of the Knicks, this time from the back office rather than the backcourt. I was done.

And conveniently, I had a new team to embrace, just a little over a mile from my house.

I know the Nets aren’t championship-caliber yet, but it is clear they are building a solid foundation and, more important, they represent my motherland.

As I contemplated this monumental decision, I sought the counsel of an old classmate, Isaac. Though we had seen each other only sporadically in our post-college years, he had been seated next to me in the nosebleeds during most of the Knicks games I attended in high school. When I called him, I explained that I was thinking about defecting to the Nets. Though Isaac is a Manhattanite, he admitted he was also wavering, and said he would attend a Nets game this season to “see how it feels.”

A little over a week ago, I went to the Barclays Center for my first Nets game. Though the team has been using the Jumbotron to encourage a variety of chants from the audience, the only cheer that seems to stick is fans simply shouting “Brooklyn.” It felt right. I was home.

After Monday night’s win over the Knicks, I received two text messages from Isaac, who, for now, is sticking with our old team.

“Oh man,” he wrote. “Oy. Congrats.”

My reply consisted of just two words: “Join us!”

He has yet to answer.

By Alex Fine.

Basketball is back. Three weeks after opening night was canceled in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, four months after the Knicks let Jeremy Lin slip out of town, 13 years since the Knicks’ fluke run to the NBA finals, and two decades since Pat Riley’s tough-guy team captivated New York in the early years of the Giuliani era, fans in the world’s greatest basketball city care without cynicism again.

The Isiah Thomas era and the Knicks’ failed pursuit of LeBron James are old news. The Nets’ long struggle for big-city relevance got lost somewhere in New York harbor. When the teams squared off Monday night in Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center, the city had plenty to cheer about: real stars, the top two spots in the Atlantic Division standings and the eyes of millions upon us.

“Brooooooklyn,” they sang in the style of Biggie Smalls—the best rallying cry in American sports—when the Nets scored a bucket. “MVP!” they chanted when Knicks star Carmelo Anthony stepped to the free throw line. The crowd was so loud at times it was hard to believe that the 17,000-plus fans weren’t all cheering for the same side.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg was among them, as were Michael Strahan, Charlie Rose, Richard Gere and, of course, Nets part-owner Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé. By our count, there were 100 members of the press on hand, including representatives from Chinese, German and Italian outlets. ESPN had 12 journalists at the game, in case you were wondering how the sports network gauged its importance.

In the end, Mr. Anthony missed a jumper that would have won the game in regulation, and the Nets outlasted the Knicks in overtime. It didn’t matter, much.

For a night, we could forget that the Knicks hadn’t won a title in 40 years, forget about Bernard King’s balky knees and Patrick Ewing’s shaky nerves, forget about anything having to do with Mr. Thomas.
New York was back where it belonged, as the basketball center of the universe.

New York is a basketball town, God help us. There’s something in the collective DNA that tells us hoops is the most important sport, some vague understanding that there are neighborhoods where a kid can still become immortal on a playground, some distant memory of the days when teams traveled to media and not vice versa, the days when the Garden earned the right to be called Mecca.

So what if it’s an empty boast? So it’s been 40 years since Willis and Clyde led the team to glory, longer still since the city produced a truly elite player. (Best New York City product in the last 25 years is ... Stephon Marbury?) Basketball is the ultimate confidence sport, and New York is the fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence town. Don’t forget the darker days when the city’s greatness wasn’t a given, the days of “It’s a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” when we could swap tales of Earl “the Goat” Manigault snatching quarters off Harlem backboards—or Willis Reed staggering onto the court for game seven of the 1970 finals, John Starks rising high over Jordan and Grant for a left-handed jam—and recognize a grace and gall and toughness we imagined in ourselves.

Suffice it to say the psychic stakes were high for us Knicks fans setting foot in the Barclays Center on Monday night. Indeed, in the years since Bruce Ratner first broke ground, I often feared that the Knicks’ woes would continue, that the hangover from Mr. Thomas’s tenure, when the team collected overweight players with fatter contracts, would never abate, that James Dolan would remain a pox on the franchise. And that, in the absence of a team they cared about, the fickle masses would give in to the allure of the hottest borough, the newer arena, the team with one owner who’s rich enough to run for Russian president and another who doesn’t simply not suck, but doesn’t suck so much that he’s married to Beyoncé.

Would I blame them? No. Excommunicate? Probably. But something would tear loose from the fabric of my city if New York were no longer a Knicks town.

I can report that a trip to the Nets’ new arena offers temptation enough for a lesser-willed fan to cross over: High ceilings (this is Brooklyn, so exposed ducts, natch) and open sightlines; a thoughtfully curated selection of local food (Spumoni Gardens for the natives, Fatty ’Cue for the arrivistes, Nathan’s for the tourists); instead of the light shows that often mar pregame introductions, a dignified volley of fireworks. Instead of stadium anthems, music that reminds you that Brooklyn belongs to the world. (We have to wonder, though, how big a cut the sound man is getting from Roc-A-Fella Records: with the exception of the periodic Biggie track, it was almost entirely Jay-Z’s catalog.)

Slick Rick played at halftime. He was pudgy, and some of the words were lost in the acoustics, but still, it was a classy nod to New York City’s hip-hop history, and something that’s hard to imagine going down at corporatized Madison Square Garden.

I can also report, happily, that on the evidence of one evening, the fan exodus isn’t happening. Led by Mr. Anthony—reinspired, the sportswriters say, and leaner at the waist after playing alongside Mr. James in the London Olympics—and Tyson Chandler, the biggest man on the court, if not tip to toe, then certainly by the size of his heart, the Knicks have the look of a title contender. Maybe not a favorite, but at least a plausible long shot. It’s not just the fans who think so: the team filled out its roster for this season with veterans like Jason Kidd and Rasheed Wallace, the type of already-rich players lured not by the biggest paycheck but by the best title shot.

So the Nets fans were more numerous, more conspicuous in their “Fan Since Day One” badges (oh really?) and black-and-white Brooklyn gear. Knicks fans were, if not louder, better at the business of being fans. They chanted “Defense” from the first possession and serenaded Mr. Anthony at the free-throw line. Maybe it was simple sports loyalty, as Spike Lee, the world’s most public Knicks fan, tweeted at Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz: “With All Due Respect I’ve Been A NEW YORK KNICERBOCKERS Devotee Since 1967, Not Gonna Switch.” And as Mike Williams, a Knicks fan from East New York, Brooklyn, told us in the spacious bowels of the arena, “Knicks fans have been Knicks fans forever. The Nets are just a novelty.”

But let’s not overindulge in name-calling, at least not in the afterglow of this happy new rivalry. Who cares if the black-and-white-clad masses remember nothing of the Drazen Petrovic tragedy, the Derrick Coleman disappointment, if they had to read the banners hanging from the rafters to know the Nets won a pair of ABA titles in the days before the merger?

Instead, let’s celebrate for a moment the improbable course that led these two teams to their current exalted status. Nets general manager Billy King, who achieved middling results as the decision-maker for the Philadelphia 76ers, bet that by paying heavily for swingman Joe Johnson, late of the Atlanta Hawks, he could convince Deron Williams, his star free agent point guard, to re-sign with the Nets.

Meanwhile, if the Knicks are as good as their early play has promised, the fans will owe the team’s salvation (or at least, above-averageness) to the last figure they’d expect: current GM Glen Grunwald didn’t just play college ball with Isiah Thomas at Indiana University, he was hired by Zeke on two separate occasions. The Knicks are wont to downplay the relationship between the pair, lest they stoke our suspicions that the former GM is still conspiring to ruin the team. Mr. Thomas isn’t so coy: “I love Glen, he’s one of my favorite people on earth,” he told ESPN Radio last summer.

Who cares? Like players, executives come and go: love and hatred for them are fleeting emotions, and for the moment, Mr. Grunwald’s free-agent signing of shot-blocker Mr. Chandler and installation of defensive-minded head coach Mike Woodson (another one of Mr. Thomas’s Indiana pals), are all anyone needs to know.

The Brooklyn partisans can speak for themselves. Mark Anise, a Brooklyn resident who loves his borough so much he had a Nets ‘B’ tattooed on his right bicep on the ground floor of the Barclays Center, told me: “Basketball was the one sport where I always rooted for the name on the back of the jersey. I always said if Brooklyn got a team, then I’d root for the name on the front.”

Never one to mince words when it comes to his love for his hometown, Mr. Markowitz emailed The Observer, “Our fans are so wild, so over-the-top, so proud and so loud that even residents of the outer borough of Manhattan will hear us cheering for the best team in New York and the best team in the NBA, the Brooklyn Nets.”

On the way down to the postgame press conference, I passed an usher with his hands clasped in the air in the shape of the Roc-A-Fella diamond in an homage to Jay-Z. “We’re coming for you, Spike,” a colleague usher said to Mr. Lee, who wasn’t in the arena, or to no one. Or everyone.

Well, let them come—it’s good to have a rival. The great Knicks team of my youth, Pat Riley’s boys, tapped into the ethos of 1990s New York: tough as Charles Oakley, the man who used to ride an exercise bike to the point of tears, and cocky as John Starks, who played his college ball in nowhere Oklahoma, and believed even then that he was better than any of the anointed kings of the NBA. And so we loved them for it.

In the hearts of the city’s sports fans, they were displaced by Derek Jeter’s Yankees: brilliant hardworking men who made their fortune in New York City, tapped in less to the town’s blue collar roots than to the Wall Street princes who defined a revitalized city.

These Knicks aren’t that tough or that classy, and neither are these Nets. But the city doesn’t need an NBA title. Yet. For the moment, it’s enough to care.

pclark@observer.com

Sipping a drink, or tipping off the team? (Getty Images)

Much has been made the last several days of the secretive nature of Jay-Z's conversations while sitting in the front row of basketball games (Knicks and Nets). He covers his mouth to avoid lip-readers, has a secret handshake for friends like LeBron James, and may be using some form of covert CIA-level cryptology to alert his posse that he needs more popcorn.

We took a look at pictures of Jay enjoying games throughout the years to see if we could decipher his gestures.

"While we have always respected Carmelo as a player, when we met the other night--I enjoyed that meeting, liked him a lot--it was clear he wanted to come to our city and play for our franchise," Mr. Dolan said.

The emphasis was his.

After monopolizing the five boroughs for the past five decades, Mr. Dolan's Knicks are suddenly on the defensive.

Crowding the city's basketball spotlight is an outsize Russian billionaire, Mikhail Prokhorov, who, in May of last year, purchased the lowly New Jersey Nets--the vagabond stepchild now bound for Brooklyn--and declared, in all his Bond-villain blandness, that he would "turn Knicks fans into Nets fans."

As Mr. Anthony dangled from Denver and the Knicks demurred on sealing a deal, Mr. Prokhorov made a last-minute, over-the-top offer that included the Nets' best player, its top prospect and four first-round draft picks, all in the hopes of denying the Knicks their biggest swap since Bernard King in the early 1980s, and luring the Brooklyn-born Mr. Anthony back home. 

Mr. Dolan, in turn, went all in, throwing in a package of young talent that seemed to belie the patient, piece-by-piece approach that had dragged the franchise back to respectability under his resident basketball guru, general manager Donnie Walsh.

"The Nets are trying to hang in the ball game, that's why we had to give up so much," said Walt "Clyde" Frazier, who sat in the front row alongside other Knicks legends during Mr. Anthony's introductory press conference.

"There's clearly a rivalry going," said Robert Boland, a professor of sports management at N.Y.U., who said the greatest threat to any franchise is losing the exclusivity of its market. "It seems that Prokhorov is not going to let this thing go without a battle. He's going to fight in the streets for this one."

He already has, actually.

Shortly after buying the team, Mr. Prokhorov plastered a 225-foot billboard of himself and co-owner Jay-Z--under the headline "The Blueprint for Greatness"--in plain view of the Knicks' offices at 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, and rented his own office space at Aby Rosen's Seagram Building in midtown.

In October, Mr. Dolan returned the volleys with a massive billboard of star forward Amar'e Stoudemire--under the banner "BROOKLYN REPRESENT"--just a few blocks from the Nets' nascent arena at Brooklyn's Atlantic Yards.

The budding rivalry stands to be one of the more colorful conflicts in the annals of New York sports.

Mr. Dolan is squat, with a big belly and a bush of brown hair above a face straight out of a Thomas Nast cartoon; he grew up on Long Island, where he now lives with his wife and children, and is a proud teetotaling 12-stepper.

Mr. Prokhorov is a slender 6-foot-8, with a physique carefully refined by twice-daily workouts, who calls his 21,500-square-foot mansion on the outskirts of Moscow his "bachelor pad," and in 2007 was detained for 88 hours in France for allegedly flying in Russian prostitutes. He frequents Moscow's clubs but claims never to have consumed more than a single sip of vodka.

Mr. Dolan nixed his dreams of being a rock star while a student at SUNY-New Paltz, but still toils in a blues band, J.D. and the Straight Shot, and was an avid sailor and competitive yachter before giving up the sport a few years ago.

Mr. Prokhorov did an obligatory stint in the Soviet Army as a youth, and still enjoys shooting AK-47s; he eschews yachting for a 300-pound jet ski.

Mr. Dolan mostly shuns the media, running what has been characterized in the past as a draconian press operation that closely monitors nearly every word uttered by Garden employees and bounds departing ones with strict nondisclosure agreements.

Mr. Prokhorov claims to have funded an opposition newspaper in the mining town he controlled--just to keep a healthy dose of dissent--and, at times, he might be too revealing for his own good. Last year, he showed off his favorite Kalashnikov to 60 Minutes, and before an interview last month, he challenged a reporter to match him in the eye-hand exercises of Tescao, a Tibetan martial art.

(A Knicks spokesman said Mr. Dolan and other Garden officials were unavailable for comment. Mr. Prokhorov was heli-skiing in British Columbia; a spokesperson said he was unavailable to speak.)

Mr. Dolan was groomed from a young age to take over his father's Cablevision empire, selling subscriptions and decamping to Cleveland to start a sports radio station, all while preparing to succeed his father as CEO.

Mr. Prokhorov was reared in a small apartment in Soviet Russia, and his first business venture involved stone-washing jeans to sell during perestroika, followed by a rise through the ranks of post-Soviet banking before coming to dominate the Russian mining market.

They share at least one common trait: Both want to rule New York's basketball market.

Mr. Dolan would very much like to counteract the past decade of futility, one that left an impression that he was more concerned with the parent company's bottom line than with hanging new banners from the Garden rafters.

"Jim Dolan has always taken, to me, unnecessary hits as far as wanting to win," said Jeff Van Gundy, the Knicks' coach from 1996 until his resignation in 2001. "Maybe you question the methodology, but he's always wanted to win."

"He's had such a negative reputation for so long, in terms of what the Knicks haven't done in recent years, I think he knew above all else that he had to get this deal done," said Wayne McDonnell Jr., a sports business professor at N.Y.U., of the Anthony trade.

For Mr. Dolan, adding Mr. Anthony helps the entire MSG empire. It boosts the television ratings, ups the in-stadium advertising fees and helps book the luxury boxes--all of which help to offset the nearly $800 million in renovations the arena is undergoing.

The challenge for Mr. Prokhorov is to somehow chip away at the prestige, and now the buzz, of Mr. Dolan's monopoly.

He has brazenly guaranteed a championship within five years, and--even as the team watched Mr. Anthony slip away--he crowed about the Nets' impact on the deal. "I think we've made a very good tactical decision to force Knicks [sic] just to pay as much as they can," he told CNBC, even before the trade was officially completed.

A few hours before the Knicks' press conference to introduce Mr. Anthony, the Nets announced a new star of their own: Deron Williams, acquired in an out-of-nowhere swap with Utah that was certain to crowd the next day's headlines.

"We all love to have rivals," said Mark Cuban, the outlandish Dallas Mavericks owner and fellow billionaire to whom Mr. Prokhorov is often compared, in an email to The Observer. "He is a good guy," Mr. Cuban wrote. "Smart. Passionate. Competitive. Most importantly, he is witty as shit. He loves a good battle of the words, even if it isn't his native language." (Mr. Prokhorov is unlikely to match the noisy courtside presence of Mr. Cuban. A person familiar with the plans said Mr. Prokhorov is assembling an in-house retreat for himself 10 times the size of a standard luxury box "for he and his Russian friends.")

The Knicks' official position is to feign a lack of concern. "While we always respect any competition, the Garden will always be the Garden," the company said in a statement.

And, on the night of Mr. Anthony's debut, the Garden was very much the Garden again, for the first time in recent memory.

In the concourse, fans pulled brand-new "Anthony" jerseys over their shirt
s, and the crowd stayed on its feet for the layup lines, snapping cell phone shots of Mr. Anthony in his new uniform.

Then the arena went pitch black, Diddy's "Coming Home" floated over the PA, and a quotation from Mr. Anthony flashed on the scoreboard. "I was born May 29, 1984 in Brooklyn, N.Y."

If Mr. Prokhorov has any hope of capturing the city's affection, he must first conquer Brooklyn, which could prove a rocky beachhead.

The rosiest scenario has the Nets replacing the bygone baseball Dodgers as the borough's pro sports heroes, but the prospect of a glorious homecoming is quite a bit more complicated.

"For someone like me, who's a Brooklynite through and through, it's going to create dilemmas," said Senator Charles Schumer, who was born and still lives a short bicycle ride from the new arena site. "Because I've been a Knicks fan all along, and I guess I'll have to wait until they arrive and see what happens. But my inclination is to stick with the Nets"--he shook his head--"with the Knicks."

The team's arrival has already suffered years of bad press, thanks to the protracted battle over the $4 billion development at the Atlantic Yards site in downtown Brooklyn. Before a series of court rulings resolved it and construction started in earnest last year, the battle pitted neighborhood activists, many of them newcomers who spawned the borough's gentrification, against the team's former owner Bruce Ratner, the site's developer.

The bitterness lingers.

Eric McClure, the founder of Park Slope Neighbors, said the only thing that might possibly draw him to the arena was "a Beatles reunion."

"Can Prokhorov sway Brooklynites to root for a different team?" mused Daniel Goldstein, a leader of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, the leading Atlantic Yards opposition group, in an email to The Observer from India. "If he pays them enough."

"For the hard-core anti-Yards people, I don't see them coming around that fast," conceded Borough President Marty Markowitz, a longtime supporter of relocating the team. "But I see their kids coming around. And that will motivate them."

For the majority of Brooklynites, the prospect of Nets fandom is likely to rest on the simple question of whether the team is worth watching.

"I've been a lifelong Knick fan, but winning changes everything, so if they start to win, they'll like 'em," said Larry Chertoff, a Park Slope dad, who was leaving the Atlantic Center mall on Sunday afternoon. "I don't see myself switching allegiances, but a couple years ago, when the Nets were pretty good and they had [Jason] Kidd and [Richard] Jefferson, I went out to Jersey to see them, and I enjoyed them, so you never know."

In that regard, Mr. Prokhorov seems to inspire more hope for a competitive product than Mr. Ratner ever did.

"Bruce Ratner, who I respect enormously and who made this possible--after I put the pressure on--he was never a jock, I was never a jock," Mr. Markowitz said. "This man eats and breathes basketball. He's looking at it, I don't think as an investment, as in only dollars and cents; I think he's looking at it as being a good owner."

Mr. Markowitz cited the recent trade for Mr. Williams and said he hoped the new point guard would help lure a winning team to the borough. "We'll have his back, that's for sure. He'll learn how lucky he is to be wearing a Brooklyn Nets uniform in not too long from now."

But first the team must get him there; Mr. Williams can opt out of his contract in the summer of 2012, just when the franchise is set to occupy the brand-new Barclays Center.

On Monday evening, Newark did its best to woo him.

Jay-Z and Beyoncé sat in the Prudential Center's front row; fans were showered with complimentary Williams T-shirts; the opening montage had been recast with his highlights; even the mascot, an overgrown silver fox, was wearing his No. 8 jersey.

Though the crowd was spotty--despite being within a few hundred seats of a sellout--the fans who were there gave him a rousing ovation.

Mr. Williams high-fived his teammates with a stone face. "I can't really give any assurances or say that I'll be here, when I don't know what the future holds," he had said in his first press conference last week, when asked about his long-term future with the Nets. On Friday, Mr. Prokhorov cut short his heli-skiing trip to fly to San Antonio and welcome him to the organization, which hopes he'll be a cornerstone capable of luring other top talent.

While both teams tinker with their rosters over the next 16 months, the climax of this cold war won't come until the summer of 2012, when Mr. Williams and two other superstars--Orlando's Dwight Howard and New Orleans' Chris Paul--are set to hit the open market.

But with the NBA renegotiating its labor contract this summer, it's unclear just how much room Messrs. Dolan and Prokhorov will have to maneuver around each other. Will teams be able to exert a contractual clamp on their free agents like football's franchise tag? And will a strict salary cap restrict the ability of both to spend freely? No one knows, and the pessimists predict a long lockout as the two sides try to hash it out.

For Knicks' fans, though, the larger, looming question is who might be making the basketball decisions in 2012.

At Mr. Dolan's press conference, after introducing Mr. Anthony, the owner launched into an unprompted screed against rumors that he had overruled Mr. Walsh and was instead heeding the counsel of Isiah Thomas, Mr. Walsh's predecessor, who stuffed the team with an underperforming cast of bloated contracts.

"While Isiah Thomas is a friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, he was not at all involved in this process," Mr. Dolan volunteered to the crowd. "The trade was a complete effort with Donnie, Mike and I," he said, as Mr. Walsh, whose contract expires in June, sat awkwardly next to him on another stool and head coach Mike D'Antoni stared straight ahead with his arms crossed.

"I'm a die-hard Knick fan," said Shawn Mundinger, a season-ticket holder who was wearing a Ronnie Turiaf jersey on Wednesday night. He commutes to the Garden from Westhampton, even though he has to wake up at 5 a.m. for his shifts as a sanitation worker. "But if [Mr. Thomas] was ever to come back, in any way, shape or form, and the Knicks really aren't a contender, I think I'd give up my seats. I know a lot of people who feel the same way. He's just toxic, always has been."

"In my opinion, Dolan will not bring Isiah Thomas back," said Dan Klores, the veteran PR man turned documentarian, who met Mr. Walsh in 1967, and then helped him land the Knicks job four decades later. "Donnie went through the two worst years of his professional career, and it would be wonderful to have him see the fruits of his labor."

Mr. Klores, a Brooklyn native, was cautiously optimistic about what the new rivalry might mean. "Obviously, it's a great time for New York basketball," he said. "Unless the people running New York basketball screw it up."

rpillifant@observer.com

Matt Chaban contributed reporting.

Berman told Media Mob this afternoon that the other reporter restrained was David Waldstein of the Star-Ledger (a paper that dropped the Knicks as a regular beat this season and only occassionally covers the team). Berman said that "six or seven" security guards came swarming, "like offensive lineman trying to impede us from getting to the quarterback."

Berman said that PR honcho Jonathan Supranowitz asked if he was OK after the melee--Berman said he was--and asked if he was writing about it. "He never apologized," said Mr. Berman.

Berman also said that he's frequently asked about the story in the Observer that chronicled the hellish work conditions for Knicks reporters, and that a New York Magazine reporter has been talking to the Knicks-beat guys recently--and is planning a west-coast trip--for a similar story.