Mike Lupica: In a brutal New York sports season, the Nets might end up being the most interesting team in town

You know how the sports year has gone around here since the basketball season ended last spring. The Yankees and Mets didn’t make the playoffs, Buck Showalter barely made it to the Mets’ last game, the Yankees didn’t actually get interesting again until the other day, when Brian Cashman didn’t just play the part of a profane and professional victim, and made you think, for the first time, that he doesn’t have a job for life if the Yankees aren’t a real contender again in 2004.

The Giants? They’re in the midst of one of the great freefalls in their history, like it’s the ’70s all over again, to the point where you wonder if they might win another game before next season. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong for just about everybody involved, the general manager, the coach, the quarterback, the shine coming off all of them at record speed.

The Jets? They still have a shot, though it looks like more of a longshot every time they try to move the chains, to make the playoffs. But if the Raiders do to them on Sunday night what they did to the Giants last Sunday afternoon, then you can stick a great big fork in the Jets, too, as Jets fans start pondering what kind of future they really have if it’s built around a 40-something quarterback coming off an Achilles injury.

We no longer care that the Jets are going to win the Jersey state football championship. But now that it is basketball season again, it is very much worth talking about whether it’s going to be the Knicks or the Nets winning the city basketball title.

That is good basketball talk right there, even about whether the Nets could end up being better than the Knicks this season if they can ever stay healthy. That means even after trading Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving and everybody, seemingly, except Julius Erving last season; whether the Nets might turn into the most interesting team in town. Nobody would have thought that could be possible this close to the immediate rebuild after Durant and Irving were gone, and Sean Marks, who runs the show at Barclays Center, had to admit in front of his own fans and in front of the world that the big shot he took with not just Durant and Irving but James Harden, as well, had gone bust.

But guess what? The Nets are suddenly young and deep, with talent at all of their rotation spots. On top of that, they are fun to watch again now that they are no longer the drama kings of the National Basketball Association. You want to start someplace, start here:

Raise a hand, at least if you’re not a Nets fan, if you know that the leading scorer in basketball New York right now, either side of the river, is a 22-year old kid from LSU named Cam Thomas. That is, however, exactly what Thomas was through the first eight games his team has played, 26.9 a game, until he rolled his ankle the other night and it was announced that he was going to have to miss two weeks just when he was running this hot.

The Nets’ record sat at a modest 4-5 after getting boxed around by the Celtics in Boston Friday night. Nobody is saying that they are going to end up with a higher seed than the Knicks come playoff time, or that they could be the city team even getting one of the top four seeds in the Eastern Conference. Still: When you watch them play, when they are pushing the ball and Thomas and Mikal Bridges and Cam Johnson and Spencer Dinwiddie and Nic Claxton (when healthy) are sharing it, it’s hard not to see the possibilities, especially as well coached as they are by Jacque Vaughn.

Even Ben Simmons has shown signs of life this season, managing to score five baskets in a game twice and being in double figures in rebounds (high of 15) in five of his team’s first eight games.

Think back to what we all thought had become of the Nets when Durant was on his way to Phoenix and Irving was on his way to Dallas and that experiment has ultimately failed the way Durant-Irving-Harden had failed in the end after it felt like the three of them had been together for about three games total. Then look at where they are right now, with all these young guys getting after it the way they are. It sometimes seems that it has taken Marks about half-a-season to do what it has taken Leon Rose years to do at the Garden.

The Nets are never going to be the big game in New York, just because the Knicks are always going to be that. The Knicks are coming off a season during which Jalen Brunson became a star, and Knick fans will always wonder how Knicks vs. Heat would have played out in the end of Brunson had any help at all in Game 6, when he scored 41 points, which was more than Julius Randle and RJ Barrett and Josh Hart combined.

You see how good they can look when Randle still looks like an All-Star. We are told now that Randle started the season hurt, and there is no reason to think that he wasn’t, just off the numbers he was putting up early. But there is also no reason at this time, and this far into his Knicks career, to believe Randle will ever stop being this consistently inconsistent.

And Barrett? There is still no way of knowing just exactly where his ceiling is, no matter how many times we want to give him the game ball when he looks as great as he did against the Spurs the other night at the Garden.

Somehow, after everything that happened to the Nets and with the Nets a year ago, it is the Nets who seem like the deeper team of the two right now. Marks tried it the modern NBA way, you bet, with big stars, and the Nets came up short, even if it happened the way it did one Game 7 night against the Bucks because Durant’s sneaker was about a couple of inches too long. Now Marks tries things differently on his side of the river.

We don’t get the first Knicks vs. Nets game of the season until Dec. 20, at Barclays. If both our teams stay reasonably healthy, and remain where they are in the middle of the pack in the conference, that will be something else to talk about, a game to watch in what we very much need to be season to watch in basketball New York.

If not, we might need the Rangers carrying us all the way to baseball this time.

BELICHICK AND BRADY BY THE NUMBERS, CASHMAN OWES AN APOLOGY & JETS DIDN’T HAVE A BACK-UP PLAN …

OK, here are your fun football facts for today from my pal John Labombarda of the Elias Sports Bureau (they know everything):

Bill Belichick’s won-loss record when Tom Brady has been his quarterback in regular season games — 219-64.

Belichick’s record without Brady, first in Cleveland and now New England — 81-95.

Brady’s regular season record without Belichick — 32-18.

Belichick’s postseason record with Brady — 30-11.

His postseason record, Cleveland and New England, without Brady — 1-2.

Brady’s postseason record in Tampa Bay after he left the Patriots — 5-2.

Now obviously they needed each other over all those years with the Patriots, they were as formidable a coach/quarterback team as their sport has ever seen.

And, to be fair, it was Belichick who saw enough in Brady to give him the ball, and a chance, in the first place.

But you have to say, all in, that Touchdown Tom doesn’t miss the hoodie guy nearly as much as the hoodie guy misses him.

Right?

My friend Barry Stanton points out that the Texans sure have done better taking C.J. Stroud with the second overall pick than the Jets did with Mrs. Wilson’s son, Zach.

Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti was in a rock-and-hard place with Jim Harbaugh — and his merry prankster of a sign stealer — even before Petitti suspended Harbaugh from coaching Michigan’s last three regular season games.

But in the end, and no matter how many high-powered lawyers Michigan sends after him, Petitti had the high ground here.

And, I’m sorry, if you believe that Harbaugh had no idea what this guy Connor Stalions was doing on his tour of Big Ten stadiums, you believe that Brian Cashman’s Yankees really were victims of life’s circumstances, as opposed to a series of wrong-headed decisions.

Speaking of which?

Cashman did a significant disservice to himself, and to the Yankees, with that hour-long meltdown in front of the media in Arizona the other day.

And if he couldn’t see his way to apologizing afterward, the owner of the team should have done it for him.

In the end, Cashman performed about as well as his baseball team did last season.

By the way?

If it wasn’t analytics that got Cashman to give Aaron Hicks a 7-year contract, what was it — he thought Hicks looked really good in pinstripes?

You want some analytics?

The Yankees have won one World Series in the last 23 years.

It is worth asking, and not for the first time, how the Jets didn’t have a real quarterback in place behind Zach Wilson when this season started.

They had a back-up to Rodgers, no question.

Just no back-up plan.

How’s that working out for Joe Douglas?

Seriously: Did they really think that nothing could ever possibly happen to Aaron Rodgers, who turns 40 in December?

The news isn’t really getting much better for the mayor or New York City, is it?

Maybe even Angel Reese was impressed with Caitlin Clark putting 44 on Virginia Tech the other night.

The world was a much simpler place when it didn’t seem as if we had a tracking device on a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.

Chris Kreider continues to prove that you really can never go wrong with a Boston College man.