Knicks fans travel well, especially to Brooklyn

A biased crowd cheering on the other team. An arena filled with fans who have paid good money hoping to see you lose. The lonely, lonely feeling that it’s you and your team against an entire city.

NBA teams face these conditions all the time when they’re on the road. However, the Brooklyn Nets are the only team in the Eastern Conference to face this at least twice a year in their own arena.

How do you prepare your team for a road game in their own house? This was essentially what Nets coach Jordi Fernandez had to do for Tuesday’s game against the Knicks at Barclays Center. Fernandez acknowledged before the game that there would likely be a lot of Knicks fans in the arena, and he said his team could grow from that.

“If we stay together and play extremely hard, it’s a good opportunity for us to play a high-level game,” Fernandez said. “I don’t care who the fans cheer for. It’s part of the business. I care about our fans and I care about our players. If we go out there and stay totally focused and we compete hard, we give even a chance. And that’s all we can control.”

The Knicks team that faced the Nets on Tuesday night at Barclays is a contender. The nets? They are once again in the midst of a major rebuild, thanks to the five first-round picks they received when they traded Mikal Bridges to the Knicks last season.

Still, that’s only a fraction of the story and doesn’t really explain the sea of ​​orange-and-blue at Barclays on Tuesday night. The real story here basically comes down to numbers.

Both the Knicks and Nets have had successful, star-studded teams throughout their history. Both have won titles, though the Nets’ came when they were in the ABA. The main difference between the two is that the demand for Knicks tickets is inelastic, which explains why they were able to sell out Madison Square Garden for a good portion of the last two decades despite having mostly bad teams .

Now that the Knicks have a good team — they entered Tuesday in third place in the Eastern Conference with a 28-16 record — ticket prices are out of reach for many families, unless that family wants to travel to Brooklyn like the Abruzzo family of old. Westbury did Tuesday night.

Matteo, 12, and Luca, 15, are hardcore Knicks fans and received the tickets as Christmas presents from their aunt and uncle. They had their parents, Gary and Enzo, with them and sat with a group of Knicks fans in section 114. Gary estimates that all told, with food and travel, it would cost his family of four $700 to attend the game.

“At Madison Square Garden? I’d say $1,400,” he said, adding that his family had been lucky enough to attend a few games at the Garden.

Resale prices supported it. On Tuesday morning, tickets in the 15th row at Barclays Center for this game were selling for $116 on StubHub. A comparable ticket at the Garden for a game against Sacramento was $360.

This goes a long way to explaining why Knicks fans are everywhere, except maybe Oklahoma City, which is a tough place to get to and has its own brand of hardcore fans. Knicks fans are famous for taking over visiting arenas, which 76ers fans painfully experienced in the first round of the playoffs.

“I think it’s unique to New York, and like you mentioned, it’s not just here,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said before the game. “When we play here it seems like obviously we have a lot of fans and we have a great fan base and they’re all over the country. So they support the team and we really appreciate that and we want to give them something they can be proud of.”

There were plenty of Knicks fans cheering Tuesday night. At one point, when Jalen Brunson went to the line in the second quarter, the arena erupted into MVP chants.

Only in Brooklyn.

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and sports writer at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.