NBA Preview – New York Knicks Vs Brooklyn Nets And Los Angeles Lakers Vs Clippers; Inter-City Rivalries To Spice Up The Season

The upcoming NBA season is not just a prelude to next season's mad summer. It has very interesting subplots. One of the more intriguing ones is the inter-city match-ups.

Only two cities in the NBA can boast of having two active teams. Quite appropriately, it's New York and Los Angeles.

The New York rivalry began when the New Jersey Nets moved to Brooklyn. They have Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov as their owner and he has been the most aggressive owner in that timespan. He stopped at nothing to build a competitive team, not even money.

This season, the Nets are now the favored team. They have traded for 2 of the Boston Celtics 'Big Three' in Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. Fierce competitors with championship experience. This led to various campaigns that taunted the Knicks and their fans.

It came to a head when Commissioner David Stern actually set a meeting between the two owners of the teams to keep the 'escalating tensions' in check. From the New York Post: "One July morning in 2010, Knicks Nation awoke to a Godzilla-sized rendition of Prokhorov and then team advisor and minority share owner Jay-Z plastered on the side of a building near Madison Square Garden proclaiming a "Blueprint for Greatness" as the Nets readied their move from New Jersey to Brooklyn.

According to several sources, Dolan was furious about the 22-story, 21,375 square-foot billboard and called league officials to complain, a tactic he repeated last year after Prokhorov referred to him as "that little man" in a New York Magazine article.

Enough, said the league. Is this any way for the two New York teams, who plan to share the 2015 All-Star Game, to act? So the league wanted the two men in the same room in an attempt to squash any lingering animosity and to prevent additional hostility. Enter Stern."

On the other side of the mainland, the West Coast has its own troubles. The great city of Los Angeles has had two teams for the past three decades. However, there was no rivalry as the Clippers always played the chump. Now that the roles might be reversed, the Clippers quickly took a shot. Doc Rivers, who used to coach the Boston Celtics, the Lakers rivals, covered the Lakers championship banners with their players' pictures.