Remember the New York Knicks fan who sold his fanhood on eBay? Well, he has now announced that his new team is the Los Angeles Lakers.
A couple of weeks ago, we did a story on a New York Knick fan who sold his fanhood on eBay for a nice chunk of change.
Now that he is officially done with the woeful Knicks, Evan Perlmutter, the guy who became frustrated rooting for his former team through all of the losing (and incompetence), now has a new team — the Los Angeles Lakers.
People will now say that he sold out his Knicks, literally, and cashed out his earnings on LeBron James and the new-look Lakers; and you, my good sir, would be correct.
There is something troubling with this story and it’s all rooted in the fact that fan loyalty in the NBA is all but gone now.
At first, this benign virus of “team-jumping” was a small-market phenomenon. We didn’t give two cents when a disgruntled Orlando Magic fan would jump ship to root for the Miami Heat during the Big 3 era. Heck, we didn’t blame them.
But in this day and age, “team-jumping” has found its way to legacy teams such as the Knicks and those teams, quite frankly, have done it to themselves. It really takes a lot out of you to root for a team that isn’t going anywhere and the Knicks fit that profile.
So, some fans have had enough and are now putting their love and devotion into a team that actually deserves it.
But now, fans like Perlmutter are getting the deserved label as “bandwagoners,” because team loyalty is being there through the thick-and-the-thin, not running out on them when they’re down.
This is why I’m still a Magic fan and there isn’t a price in the world that will make me betray my team.
Check out our Fandom 250 rankings to find out where fans of the Lakers, Knicks and other NBA teams ranked last year, and where they’ll fall in our 2018 rankings.