NBA Finals' Game Five Makes Brooklyn Reporter Ponder If She Should Marry Spurs Fan Fiancé or Join Knicks Fans' Parties Instead

I’ve lived in Brooklyn for the last seven years, since before the pandemic, through the lockdown, floods, snowstorms, everything. I have no plans to leave. The opposite, I just formed an LLC with my former NYU cohort and close friend to buy a property together, just like Emily Sundberg pointed out is happening more frequently in a recent Feed Me newsletter. We are looking at Crown Heights or Prospect Lefferts Gardens, but more on that later.

I’ve worked as a local journalist during those years. I worked for Brooklyn Paper and amNY. So my life is not just in New York, New York is my life, for the good and the rough, from all angles. It’s great!

When it comes to the NBA, I’m a Nets fan. This principle has been reinforced off the court. Apart from reporting on some unusual games like the Lunar Year special edition, I’ve gotten to interview some of the players and report on their community outreach activities at public schools and on Thanksgiving Eve, passing out pantry supplies. Those initiatives are not an NBA requirement. Some Nets just pull up.

As if that wasn’t enough, as everyone knows, you can’t walk for more than two blocks in Brooklyn without seeing someone wearing the Nets badge AND I LOVE THAT PASSION.

But the Nets are nowhere around right now and of course I’m thrilled for Knicks fans in all boroughs. I live for a lively game day out on the streets. I want my generation of New Yorkers to have a victory in the books that they can remember. Madison Square Garden is a little vintage and it needs a new championship banner to work as a facelift. Go Knick, except…

Please be kind to me after you read the next lines.

My fiancé is a die-hard Spurs fan.

I’m talking —half of his wardrobe is Spurs themed, his backpack too, he has a Lego-made Spurs sneaker on his desk where he puts his pens aaaaaaand he has a Spurs tattoo on his shoulder.... yep. Like I said, I love the passion.

Polaroid of me and my Spurs-tattooed boyfriend pasted on the wall at David’s Bar in the LES before the playoffs started.

I think the Spurs are a great team, but have you been around for the last week? New York is lit. I want to join the watch parties! I want to go across from Speedy in Bed-Stuy like Mayor Mamdani, Amber Jamieson from Bed-Stuy Stoop and those other 200 people! I want to watch the game on a tv out of someone’s truck outside of the bodega on Carroll Gardens’ Smith Street and almost get into trouble with the NYPD, but not quite, just like Nick Bello.

My partner, whom I’ll call Seth for privacy, and I watched game two at a bar in Midtown after the PRIDE party at the NYC Library. It was rough for him.

This video was recorded by Seth after the Knicks won by one point in the last few seconds of game two. Just like it happened on game four.

He was wearing a Spurs jersey under a hoodie he had to keep zipped up against his pride cause I asked him to for safety and it was hot out. He had to hi-five one of many rowdy Knicks fans on the street coming at us from every direction, even though he was miserable. And there was no ignoring the conversations on the L train sh!t-talking his dear Spurs.

It wasn’t so bad everywhere. Once we arrived at Knockdown Center to hear Marten Lou’s amazing set, Seth unzipped his hoodie and was approached by many Knicks fans looking for slightly friendlier sh!t-talk. Except, right outside, at 4 am, in the middle of the usual traffic knot of Uber drivers looking for distracted rave goers, when a trucker decided to stick to his horn for what seemed like an entire minute and then yelled at us as we were waiting on the sidewalk, “F#$k you, a$$h@les and f#$k the Spurs, you b!#ch” with a heavy NY accent and without breaking eye contact as he dutched a black SUV.

Seth and I both laughed pretty hard at that.

Then came Game 4. Seth was absolutely resolved to watch the game at home and didn’t want to ditch him after the hostility episode out in the city he loves as well. So we stayed in.

We started watching on streaming about an hour after the game began, so we could skip the commercials and finish around the same time the game ended in real time. But, as it does, life happened and we were about an hour behind. If you, reader, watched the exhilarating game along with Spike Lee, Ben Stiller, Jimmy Fallon, Taylor Swift, Timothée Chalamet and the rest of the planet, you might well know that with a real-time hour left of the game, deep into the third quarter, the Spurs were up by 20+ points.

We were at that point when the rest of New York saw the Knicks pull their on-brand —yet never this intense— last-minute score flip to win by ONE POINT. From inside our soundproofed apartment, Seth coughed a firework out of the corner of his eye, which spoiled the rest of the game for him. Just his luck.

For the rest of the night, my social media was nothing but videos of the wildest street parties and I was salivating.

“[Seth] is the best partner, I love him. But you seen those videos. And now game five will be on a Saturday night. This city is gonna erupt in flames. I can’t wait.

I know a bar in Bed-Stuy that has a legacy Spur, Manu Ginobili jersey behind the bar, Doris, and they posted invites for Spurs fans to watch all the games there. Some people have commented that going there has been a fun time. I also know it won’t be even close to the rush I’m looking for, or even comparable to the riot right outside. What do Bed-Stuy experts think? Should we go watch game five at Doris? What do Knicks fans who don’t want to see blood say?

Please comment and save my engagement.