NBA

The Secret Life of the NBA’s Most Mysterious Blogger

For decades, Bob Windrem has obsessively chronicled the Brooklyn Nets under a pseudonym. But the man behind NetsDaily has spent much of his life chasing secrets—and keeping a few of his own.

NBA

The Secret Life of the NBA’s Most Mysterious Blogger

For decades, Bob Windrem has obsessively chronicled the Brooklyn Nets under a pseudonym. But the man behind NetsDaily has spent much of his life chasing secrets—and keeping a few of his own.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bob Windrem’s head was spinning as he got off a New Jersey Transit train at Penn Station. Windrem was a senior investigative producer for NBC Nightly News, and, with cellphone service disrupted in Midtown Manhattan, he couldn’t respond to messages from his bosses. Desperate to get to work and contemplating what might be asked of him upon arrival, he was struck by something as he ran across 32nd Street: He wouldn’t be able to post on NJ.com’s Nets message board for a while.

“God’s honest truth,” Windrem said. “And then I thought to myself, What the fuck are you thinking?”

If you know who Windrem is, this particular intrusive thought isn’t surprising. The man is, in the parlance of NBA podcasts, an absolute sicko. This past July, a couple of days after Mikel Brown Jr.’s California Classic debut, Windrem was still buzzing about the Nets’ latest lottery prospect at a café in Battery Park City. He described the time period between summer league and the preseason as the “great dark emptiness.”

Windrem, a.k.a. “Net Income,” is the internet’s most prominent and prolific Brooklyn Nets blogger. But he is no ordinary sicko. He’s a sicko who has been with NetsDaily for almost 22 years, since before much of Web 2.0’s sports media landscape existed—before FreeDarko, TrueHoop, or Deadspin. And he has a background unlike that of anyone else who writes about the NBA. In 40 years at NBC News, Windrem covered national security, nuclear weapons, terrorism, and the CIA. He cowrote a book on nuclear nonproliferation. He arranged interviews with heads of state. He used the Net Income pseudonym because, when he started posting, he wasn’t sure how his employer would feel about it.

“He would say, ‘Yeah, I was in Iran, I had to go interview [then-President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad,’” NBA.com’s John Schuhmann, who founded NetsDaily in 2004, said. “Like, all right. And then you come back and you’re talking about Chris Douglas-Roberts and Terrence Williams.”

Windrem is now 81 years old and presides over a team of 10 writers and contributors at NetsDaily. In 1962, he watched Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, then a high school sophomore known as Lew Alcindor, dominate a game, and he shook the 15-year-old’s enormous hand afterward. In 1965, he became the sports editor of The Setonian, Seton Hall’s student newspaper, and the next year was promoted to editor in chief. He did color commentary for Seton Hall’s basketball games and cohosted the postgame show, too. He was a Knicks fan in the ’70s, but, obviously, that didn’t stick.

Online, Windrem can be abrasive—Schuhmann didn’t like him at first and learned the definition of “banal” because Windrem used the word to describe other NJ.com posters’ opinions—but IRL he has the genial vibe of a popular professor. When Anthony Puccio, now the editor in chief, first started writing for NetsDaily, he had no idea who the man behind its acerbic Twitter account was, only that his real name was Bob. Puccio was stunned by his age and intellect when they met.

“He was the smartest man that I’d ever spoken to,” Puccio said.

Many OG bloggers were stylists. Others dug into X’s and O’s. Windrem “was kind of on his own plane of existence,” Devin Kharpertian, who ran competing sites Nets Are Scorching and The Brooklyn Game, said. At a time when a bunch of young writers were looking to get their names out there and start a career, the man behind NetsDaily was in his 60s, had a remarkable résumé, and didn’t want people to know who he was.

“[He’s an] omniscient force in Nets world,” Kharpertian said. Windrem’s writing has a particular kind of authoritativeness, a product of a decades-long obsession. On the eve of this year’s draft, NetsDaily published a story about the “Sean Marks Trade Zone” in which Windrem noted that the front office had made a move shortly before or after the draft in nine of the previous 10 years. Less than an hour later, news broke that Brooklyn was trading for Julius Randle.

“I used to joke that the tagline for The Brooklyn Game was ‘We watch the Nets so you don’t have to,’” Kharpertian said. “But to be honest, that was really Bob to a T. If you ever wanted to know anything about what was happening with the Nets at any given time, you would just check on this guy who was like a robot with how much work and time and energy and stuff he put in.”

It is difficult for Lucas Kaplan, who joined NetsDaily in 2021, to explain Windrem to his friends. “I can get 75 percent of the way there,” Kaplan said. “‘Yeah, man, the editor at the site I write for is hilarious. He was an award-winning NBC journalist.’ I tell them stories of when Bob will compare things to his time reporting on the Taliban and going through Taliban PR, and that always gets them.” To “really get the essence” of Windrem, though, Kaplan believes you have to spend time with him.

One time Kaplan, 25, met up with his octogenarian buddy, and Windrem came bearing a gift: Robert Caro’s memoir, Working. When they discuss reporting, Windrem often cites the advice Caro famously received as a young journalist from a Newsday editor: “Turn every page.” Most of the time they talk, though, they’re discussing the Nets “in almost gossipy sort of ways,” Kaplan said, fully aware that the relationship is something out of a sitcom.

“I cherish it,” Kaplan said. “It is also objectively funny.”

Puccio came up with a shorthand: “I always say, ‘You know the Dos Equis commercial, the most interesting man in the world?’ I say, ‘That’s Bob Windrem; that’s Net Income.’” Given the enormous number of people who have seen Windrem’s work and know nothing about him, though, Puccio believes “the Banksy of NBA media” is more apt.

Like Banksy, Windrem is now unmasked. He still goes by Net Income, but his real name is on his NetsDaily author page, which notes that he has won more than 40 national journalism awards. His NetsDaily identity wasn’t completely anonymous the entire time he was at NBC News—he appeared alongside Dexter Henry, now of the New York Post, in a few NetsDaily videos, and he did a meet and greet with readers on the site’s 10th anniversary—but he kept his two worlds mostly separate until he retired from his day job in 2020.

When an 18-year-old Victor Wembanyama put on a show against the G League Ignite in October 2022, Windrem declared the French phenom ”far more advanced” than Abdul-Jabbar had been at the same age. He cited his own memory. Responses ranged from “What a flex” to “Bruh was the one that gave James Naismith the idea to cut out the bottom of the peach basket.”

Steve Capus, a former president of NBC News, said that Windrem probably didn’t have to be so secretive about his side gig, but the decision to write under a pseudonym was “actually kind of perfect.” Windrem was the kind of investigative reporter who was extremely plugged in but didn’t draw much attention to himself. And he spent decades trying to uncover closely guarded secrets.

“This is classic, this is all like his CIA sources and other stuff,” Capus said. “Maybe he got a little too close to the espionage world, and that's where he got the idea of disguising himself in plain sight.”

He was Net Income online, but to many in the newsroom, he was known as Spooky Bob. This was “not because he was creepy,” former Rachel Maddow Show producer Nick Tuths said, but because “he’s reporting on stuff that would scare the shit out of you.”

Tuths, a fellow NBA sicko four decades Windrem’s junior, incorrectly assumed that he was the only one in the NBC newsroom who had thoughts about why Sean Williams hadn’t lived up to his potential. Then one day, Windrem overheard him ranting on the phone about a draft prospect’s numerous flaws. At the end of the conversation, Windrem sidled up and shared some intel: The Nets, much to his dismay, were thinking about bringing that prospect in for a workout.

Coworkers noticed Windrem stopping by Tuths’s desk, where the two discussed NBA minutiae in hushed tones. When they asked what he and Spooky Bob were talking about, Tuths would tell them he really shouldn’t say.

“If I was drafting off of a little bit of his aura, I think that’s something that he would appreciate and respect,” Tuths said.

Windrem did live TV hits and, later in his tenure, had plenty of bylines on NBCNews.com. Most of his work, however, was done behind the scenes. During Brian Williams’s interview with Ahmadinejad in Tehran, Windrem was stationed behind the president with paper and a black Magic Marker. He flashed a makeshift cue card when he wanted Williams to ask a follow-up.

Capus said that Windrem “always gave us an edge.” Sometimes, when he was on the phone, he’d raise his hand to indicate he had something, “and we’d all kind of wait and let him finish up.” Star journalists like Tom Brokaw and Andrea Mitchell looked to Windrem when trying to confirm stories, and, for every confirmation, Capus said, there were “probably three that he steered us away from,” some of which NBC might have otherwise wasted time and money on by dispatching a reporter overseas for.

“Everybody used to do an imitation of Bob in the newsroom, and it was always him going, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,’” Capus said.

In May 1988, two years after the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, Windrem spent a day there for a story about the aftermath. The next year, he went to five continents in 12 days to report on how Israel was helping apartheid South Africa develop its missile and nuclear programs. Undercover as a tourist in Johannesburg, he showed the camera crew how to best shoot the secret military facility and found a source willing to talk about how the missile launches had disrupted the fishing industry. Every once in a while, there’d be some lighter fare—covering a theatrical troupe called Montana Shakespeare in the Parks was “one of the most fun things I ever did,” Windrem said—but stories about the Mexican drug wars, Hurricane Katrina, and Big Tobacco were far more representative.

Given the demands of his job at NBC and the frequency of his posts on NetsDaily, one may wonder how Windrem juggled both. “I was, back then at the very least, fairly energetic,” he said. Rather than sapping his energy, though, his second outlet may have replenished it. When your work involves cataloging terrorist attacks, cataloging scouting reports on a drafted-and-stashed prospect can serve as a welcome diversion.

“It helped keep me sane,” Windrem said.

Over the years, Windrem has updated NetsDaily from Tehran, Istanbul, Riyadh, Rome, Paris, Honolulu, Rio, Hong Kong, Berlin, and Singapore. “I’ve been to 63 countries, and I know how the world works a bit,” he said, and this gives him a certain cachet with people in the basketball world. Nets general manager Sean Marks said that, every time he talks to Windrem one-on-one, “we end up talking about things other than the Nets, too, which for me is enlightening.”

In 1997, NBC Nightly News aired a story about Osama bin Laden in which Mitchell called him “the new face of terror.” It was the first bin Laden story on American television. Windrem produced it and procured the footage of bin Laden. Afterward, with sources telling him that bin Laden was a real threat, Windrem continually pushed for more coverage, to the point that his boss started calling him “bin Windrem.”

Windrem recalls that, about four and a half hours after the second plane struck the World Trade Center on 9/11, his best source at the CIA told him with 90 percent certainty that Al Qaeda was responsible. He shouted that information across the newsroom to Brokaw, who walked onto the set and reported it. 

Capus, who then produced NBC Nightly News, saw requests come in from correspondents based all over the world: What is Windrem hearing? Can Bob help chase this down? “The entire world was turned upside down,” Capus said, and there was immense pressure to get the story right. That they did, he said, was in large measure thanks to Windrem. 

“Bob was not a household name by any stretch,” Capus said. “But he was certainly an MVP.”

Windrem and his NBC colleagues found themselves in the center of the universe when anthrax arrived in the newsroom in an envelope addressed to Brokaw. “Quietly, we were talking to Bob,” Capus said, “because we were all scared to death.” Windrem offered comfort by noting that the anthrax was in a cutaneous form—had it aerosolized, they’d all be dead.

Windrem was with his 7-year-old son at the Meadowlands watching a nail-biter between the Nets and the Phoenix Suns in December 1993 when he noticed the man in a Nets jersey across the aisle. The man was going wild, despite his wife’s desperate attempts to calm him down. Windrem couldn’t imagine himself living and dying with a team that way.

The Nets lost by one, but the Windrems had fun. From there, Windrem marched slowly toward the die-hard fandom he’d previously thought was preposterous: more trips to the Meadowlands, then 10-game packages and thousands of forum posts. What began as a way to bond with his son became a passion of his own. In January 2005, Schuhmann, who had launched NetsDaily the previous year, needed someone to fill in for a couple of weeks because his wife was about to have their first child. Windrem volunteered, and he never left.

That summer, Schuhmann got hired by NBA.com and handed the site off to Windrem. The next season, Windrem split season tickets with Dennis Lin, a fan he’d met through a Nets online forum. They paid $199 each and sat in the second-to-last row.

“I remember going to a preseason game and getting excited about Antoine Wright, fool that I was,” Windrem said.

Windrem had high hopes for MarShon Brooks, Chris Chiozza, and Cam Thomas, too. He regularly references something that former Nets executive Irina Pavlova told him years ago: Fandom is about irrational exuberance. His feelings as a fan of this star-crossed franchise, though, have always been balanced by an intense loyalty to facts. Lin wanted to split season tickets with him because, in relation to other Nets fans, Windrem “had more rational takes,” Lin said. 

On the one hand, Windrem sounded completely sold on Brown and Egor Demin being Brooklyn’s backcourt of the future after a single game this summer. On the other, while he was in the building for Devin Harris’s miraculous, beyond-half-court game-winner in 2009, he was not among those screaming in jubilation when it went in. He wanted to be certain that it would count.

“I’ve never seen someone [else] have the journalist slider and the fan slider both turned up to 100,” Kaplan said.

Initially, NetsDaily simply aggregated other outlets’ coverage of the team, serving as a hub. Over time, Windrem turned the site into something far more comprehensive. Seasoned journalist that he is, he developed sources, broke news, reported from press conferences, brought on young writers, and expanded the scope of coverage. Now NetsDaily is not just a Nets site; it covers the New York Liberty, the Long Island Nets, and the team owners’ other business interests. In August, Windrem landed an exclusive interview with owner Joe Tsai.

Former Nets assistant general manager turned ESPN analyst Bobby Marks said that, before he learned Windrem’s identity, Net Income seemed like a “shadowy figure.” He came to trust this man of mystery, though, because Windrem cared about getting the details right and would never burn a source. Sometimes, he said, he found joy in scrolling through @NetsDaily’s live tweets after a big win “and riding the wave of emotion that he—and probably most of the fan base—did.”

When Marks worked for the Nets, NetsDaily was his home page. He said it was where everyone in the front office went for news. Sean Marks said that Windrem will often reach out a week after a transaction, interested in understanding how it fits into the bigger picture. Windrem is “pleasant to talk to,” the GM said, but is comfortable asking “questions that I may not like.” And there is no doubting his dedication.

“He—like, I think, all Nets fans—wants the best for this team,” Sean Marks said. “So his line of questioning is always about, like, ‘Why did you do this?’”

Pavlova saw the site as the team’s biggest window to the fan community. “When I joined the Nets, I was very naive and new to the business, so I joined NetsDaily with the nickname Irina and I started commenting,” she said. “And the amount of shit I got was just incredible.” After staying up “until 4 o’clock in the morning talking to idiots” one too many times, she told Windrem that she was getting too riled up, was short on sleep, and wanted him to block her account. He obliged.

Windrem is “an investigative journalist first and foremost,” Pavlova said. And whether he’s talking to an intern or an owner, he is genuinely curious. “Everyone feels important when they talk to Bob,” she said. This, to her, is what makes him dangerous.

“He will get info out of people that they don't even realize they're volunteering,” Pavlova said.

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Being both a reporter and a fan has been a bigger challenge for Windrem than being both an NBC newsman and a blog boy. “That balance is not easy to maintain,” Windrem said. “That I have learned.” On the night of the 2010 draft lottery, the Nets, coming off a 12-70 season, fell to no. 3, and Windrem’s son was devastated that John Wall would not be coming to New Jersey. Windrem had to put his own disappointment aside and write the story.

Pavlova saw Windrem as a “friendly ear,” especially compared with the beat writers, whom she suspected would have preferred to cover the Knicks. She hasn’t been involved with the Nets for nine years and has been living in Russia for the past four, but they still exchange sarcastic notes on world politics. She said she’s flattered that he keeps in touch, given that she has no connections or information to give him. She tries to see Windrem whenever she’s in New York. 

Two personalized jerseys gifted by the team—one with “WINDREM” on the back, the other with “NETSDAILY”—hang in Windrem’s home office. He has chatted with his favorite Net, Brook Lopez, at a bar with Pavlova; mingled with former owner Mikhail Prokhorov in a suite; and sat courtside with ex-chairman Dmitry Razumov. “I understand why they do things, but I also understand that it’s to my advantage,” Windrem said. “They want me to sit next to [Razumov] at a game, fine, I’m there. We’ll talk basketball or whatever else.” Windrem kept paying for his season tickets when other NetsDaily writers sat on press row because he wanted to preserve the fan experience and didn’t want anyone to get the idea that he was running the site only to get free access.

“If you think about it in an aggregate sense, it’s not possible for any one person or entity to be more of a Nets fan than Bob,” Lin said.

These days, a segment of Nets fans is frustrated with management and loud about it. Sean Marks has been in Brooklyn for more than 10 years, during which time he’s hired four head coaches, and the team’s 2-8 start this season hasn’t quieted the questions about where it’s headed. Windrem knows that many readers want him to call for everybody to be fired. He does not think that’s his job. In his view, his job is to give people an honest assessment of what’s happening, without getting too charged up about it.

“I’m not going to go on a crusade,” he said.

Before he’d written a word for NetsDaily, Windrem was the main character on the NJ.com forum. Many posters hated how he defended the front office’s decision to let Kenyon Martin walk in 2004. The personal attacks he receives now can be a bit much, but Windrem either throws a jab back or rolls his eyes. “I’m a big boy. I’ve been yelled at by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and the White House press secretary and TV anchors,” he said. He can handle a few mean tweets.

On the way home from the Jersey Shore, Windrem had pulled off the Garden State Parkway at a rest stop when the Woj Bomb dropped. It wasn’t a complete surprise that Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving would sign with the Nets in 2019—Puccio had reported that this was coming 11 days earlier—but it was still cause for celebration. Windrem called Puccio from the rest stop, but they barely said a word. “We just laughed,” Windrem said. Not only had the stars finally aligned in Brooklyn, but NetsDaily had broken the story.

The Nets superteam burned bright and flamed out like a supernova. Windrem sees the collapse as “one of the worst disasters” the NBA has ever seen. For many fans, the Knicks’ ascent was salt in the wound. But while Tsai himself told him that the Knicks’ title run was embarrassing for the franchise, Windrem is trying to keep things in perspective. “Look, there have been worse moments as a Nets fan,” he said. It’s not that long ago that he sat through 21- and 20-win records in back-to-back seasons and watched their previously traded draft picks jump to no. 3 and no. 1.

“Nets history, it’s like Russian history: never a dull moment, but it’s very rare that it’s good,” Pavlova said.

Windrem watched the Knicks’ Game 4 comeback against the Spurs at a resort in St. Lucia. The bar had an illegal stream going, and it was laggy. By looking at the play-by-play on his phone, he knew that OG Anunoby’s tip-in was coming about a minute before he saw it. He told his wife, fellow journalist Patti Domm, simply that something was about to happen.

When it did, the 15 to 20 Knicks fans in his vicinity “went crazy,” Windrem said. “And deservedly so. That was one of the great plays in the history of New York sports. You can’t deny any of that.”

Windrem was pleased, too. He’d gotten some nasty replies for saying he was rooting for New York, but that didn’t deter him. In fact, he said that supporting the Knicks in the Finals was “absolutely critical to me in order to keep my sanity.” Sure, he wished it were the Nets, but he was happy for the city. He loved that people were watching the games on the street, filling bars, and setting records for subway traffic.

The morning after the Knicks’ come-from-behind victory in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, Windrem tweeted that the Nets had never been more irrelevant. In the immediate aftermath of the Finals, they seemingly became invisible. With the city in championship hysteria, it was popular to draw a contrast between the newly crowned champs and New York’s other pro sports teams: Loyalties are divided in baseball, football, and hockey, but everyone supposedly roots for the Knicks.

“The thing that bothered me the most in all that nonsense was [the notion] that ‘there are no Nets fans,’” Windrem said. “Of course there are Nets fans.”

Windrem wouldn’t have been surprised if, during and after the title run, NetsDaily’s traffic had dipped. Instead, the opposite happened. “We keep breaking records,” he said, “in terms of not just numbers of people visiting the site, but the engagement and how long they're staying.” NetsDaily’s newser on the signing of backup center Moe Wagner has more than 2,000 comments.

For years, the Nets have tried to cultivate what they call “generational fandom” by bringing in young fans. This strategy has “taken a hit,” Windrem said, but “the serious fans, the real nerds, are very interested.” Perhaps some have concluded that, if the Knicks, of all teams, managed to get their shit together and win a title, the same is possible for the Nets one day.

As much as he enjoyed seeing New Yorkers in a state of euphoria, Windrem hopes that it’s now just a matter of time before James Dolan messes it all up. And in the meantime, maybe the Nets can find some small advantages, like being the far cheaper option for tickets.

“The cost at the Garden [this year] is gonna be through the roof to go to games,” Windrem said. “It will be Timothée Chalamet and a bunch of hedge fund managers.”

Once a year, Windrem asks himself whether or not he wants to keep going with NetsDaily. The question usually pops up around draft time, because he figures you’re in trouble if you can’t get excited then. A couple of years ago, Puccio thought that Windrem might actually step down. “He’s been pissed off in the past,” Puccio said, citing the miserable 2015-16 season, but this was different. Windrem seemed deflated. The Mikal Bridges trade marked the start of another full-fledged rebuild. Approaching 80 at the time, he wasn’t sure he had the stomach for that.

“When you’re my age, you’re never more than three months away from a health crisis,” Windrem said. “I mean, I’ve had, over the past couple of years, three different misdiagnoses of serious illnesses. Wrong each time. But, I mean, that’s what happens when you’re 81. It is what it is. But that factors into it as well. How much time can I commit to this?”

Since 2023, Windrem and Puccio have run NetsDaily together. Puccio, the editor in chief, “deals with all the awful corporate stuff,” Windrem said. The work doesn’t do much for him financially, but it brings “psychic rewards.” The day that I met him in Battery Park City, Windrem had written about Demin’s development in the morning. He thought the piece had turned out well. This is a psychic reward, as is seeing how a professional sports team operates and getting the occasional scoop. He doesn’t work on stories for weeks or months like he used to do at NBC, but he gets to write and report every day.

“I think that the reality is it’s something that I’ve done my entire life,” Windrem said. “And I don’t feel like stopping now.”

Kharpertian, who left The Brooklyn Game in 2016 and now works in advertising, was burned out by the end of his run. “Maybe it was from covering the fucking awful Nets for years, just watching teams slowly die over the course of a decade,” he said. To him, Windrem’s endurance is difficult to fathom, but that doesn’t mean he expected anything different. He said Windrem has been such a constant presence that he’d never even considered the possibility of an exit.

“It’s hard to imagine him without it,” Kharpertian said. “I think he’d fall apart.”

Windrem doesn’t have season tickets anymore—getting from Cranford, New Jersey, to Barclays Center is a lot less convenient than taking the D Train six stops from 30 Rock—but he’s still locked in. The week after this year’s draft, the team held a press conference for their three rookies, and Brown’s parents were seated up front. As soon as it was over, Windrem made a beeline for them and introduced himself. He was the only reporter who chatted them up. He was also the only reporter who, during Sean Marks’s media availability that day, asked about the Knicks winning the title.

“The fact that he’s doing it right at the age of 81, rock on,” Capus, the former NBC News head honcho, said. “That’s the age of guys like McCartney and stuff, and they’re still going strong, so why not Bob?”

Windrem has dozens of Nets-related Google Alerts set up. In May, he found an interview with Sam Zussman, the CEO of Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, in an Israeli business publication. Hours after telling me that he likes to go through LinkedIn to see whether anybody has a new job, he texted to say he’d learned that former Nets forward Keita Bates-Diop had rejoined the organization as a basketball operations assistant. Kaplan and Lin both said that covering the team the way he does is like breathing air for Windrem.

Working with the NetsDaily staff “sustains me,” Windrem said. As an editor, he will hold you to a professional standard, but he is not above adding a parenthetical saying “DFS = Damn Fine Stopper or alternately Damn Fine Shooter” to your story about Dorian Finney-Smith. “There's something about Bob that is, like, magical,” Puccio said. Puccio was going to community college and delivering pizza when he started at NetsDaily. His father was sick, his house was under threat of eviction, and he was trying to figure out what to do with his life. He’d been blogging but didn’t have any real experience.

“Bob actually taught me how to write,” Puccio said. “I didn't need to take journalism in college because I had Bob with me.”

Early on, Puccio thought he might want to go the front office route. Windrem arranged for Bobby Marks to sit down with him for a half hour of industry talk. The guy with the strange, secret double life showed Puccio around the NBC newsroom. Windrem became someone Puccio could call at any hour, someone he now considers family.

“He’s been like the mentor that every single kid dreams of having. And for someone who lost their father and lost their home and a lot of people in life, gaining a character and a personality and a friend like that is immeasurable. And that’s what I got. I know this isn’t about me. It’s just more ... he knew. He knew everything. He didn’t need to talk about it. He just took me under his wing.”

Windrem is as animated talking about the many writers who have passed through NetsDaily as he is telling you about the time he met a 20-year-old Bruce Springsteen at The Student Prince in Asbury Park. He is immensely proud that one of them, Matt Brooks, got to hold the Larry O’Brien Trophy mere months after leaving NetsDaily for a job with the Denver Nuggets. He mentioned the inevitability that Kaplan—“the best we’ve ever had”—would get hired away with a mix of dread and satisfaction. He described Connor Long, who turned 15 in July and was podcasting and writing features before that, as a “very good reporter.”

NetsDaily has always been a labor of love for Windrem. He likes talking to fellow fans and being “somewhat of an insider,” he said. He doesn’t know whether he’ll live to see the Nets win a title, but he has chosen to stay patient anyway. “Do I think they're on the right track? Most days,” he said. “Not every day. I mean, there are existential moments.” He’s rooting for Randle to thrive in Brooklyn the way that Michael Porter Jr. did last season, and for Brown and Demin to stay healthy and develop.

“If they’re going to win, they’re going to win, you know?” he said. “But I miss basketball between July and October. I’m just thrilled when October comes around and it’s preseason and I can go to a game or I watch a game on television, and I can connect with certain players and hope that certain players succeed beyond anybody’s wildest imagination. And I can fret as well and be pissed off. But I just like being part of the community, and I think there’s a lot of people like that.”

Once, Windrem accompanied his wife on a bird-watching trip. Domm, a serious birder, has gone as far as Tanzania for her hobby, but this time the couple just went to South Jersey. They saw some bald eagles, but the experience was not one that Windrem felt the need to repeat. Birding is her thing. Nets basketball, for better or for worse, is his.

“It’s going to be two steps forward, one step back, hopefully, rather than the reverse,” Windrem said. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, you don’t criticize them.’ Well, first of all, be optimistic. This isn’t real life. This isn’t the war in Iran. This isn’t denying people Medicaid. This is a diversion. Have fun with it. Don’t get so involved in it that you lose sight of the fact that it’s supposed to be fun.”