Basketball Season in New York City and Practicing Your English during the Season November 9, 2017

As I mentioned in my previous post when I was sharing information about New York City’s two professional hockey teams as well as some basic terms for your reference, here we’ll discuss the city’s two biggest basketball teams as part of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Since this is another winter sport, you’ll notice a lot of coverage of this sport and these teams in the coming months. As is with all the other major league sports in the United States, fans take their teams very seriously, so it should be helpful to keep that in mind when you’re practicing your English social skills with these fans!

1. New York Knicks, Madison Square Garden, Manhattan

This team (whose full name is actually the New York Knickerbockers) was founded in 1946, so they’ve definitely been around for quite some time. Their fans will stand out to you since their colors are blue, orange, silver, black, and white—very similar to baseball’s New York Mets and hockey’s New York Islanders—are you noticing a theme yet?? The team has performed only mildly in the recent years, yet despite their less than decent performance, you’ll again notice that their fans simply don’t give up on them. The Knicks also share this venue with hockey’s New York Rangers, so you might notice some game and sport crossover during the winter months in this neighborhood. It’s pretty cool to see the mixture of different fans crossover during this season. (Plus, if you remember, football season is also going strong during the beginning winter months, so you’ll probably see some New York Giants and New York Jets fans mixed in with the crowds!).

2. Brooklyn Nets, Barclays Center, Brooklyn

This is a new name for the team, who until 2012 used to be called the New Jersey Nets and before that the New York Nets. This is also a fairly newer team overall, as they weren’t founded until 1967. Their home arena is the Barclays Center, so again, you might see some overlap in the Nets fanbase with hockey’s New York Islanders fanbase if you spend some significant time in Brooklyn. Simply, the Nets’ colors are black and white, so they offer a distinct color difference from the Knicks’ colors. The Brooklyn Nets haven’t seen that much success either in the most recent years, though approximately ten years ago they showed some amount of consecutive success with a few divisional and conference titles.

As I mentioned in my previous posts about practicing your English with these fellow fans, the same can be said with the basketball fans. For the most part, they’re pretty friendly and willing to chat about the game or certain players, so just keep the conversation light by asking them why they’re Knicks or Nets fans, who their favorite player is, or even about the importance of their legacy. Trust me, they’ll be more than happy to chat about it!

To help either guide these conversations or to simply help you understand the game and the terms you’ll hear if you attend a game, I’ve included a brief glossary of common terms and phrases that you can keep in your back pocket to make understanding it all that much easier. This is also a great time to use your translator apps, as these games move quickly, and you may not have the chance to look everything up!

• Airball: a missed shot that doesn’t hit the rim or the net
• Brick: another missed shot that actually does hit the rim but still doesn’t go in
• Dribble: this is the move the players make when they’re bouncing the ball with their hands and also running down the court
• Dunk: this is a scoring shot when a player puts the ball through the basket with their hand hanging from the rim
• Travel: this is a penalty call if a player is moving his legs without dribbling the ball; this happens quite often, so you’ll probably get familiar with it quite quickly
• Swoosh: this is more of a sound made by the fan if a ball goes directly through the net without hitting the rim—making the sound is a version of light celebration