As the NBA Playoffs draw to a close we are once again bombarded with Memes calling fans of the Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers bandwagoners. For anyone who does not follow sports, bandwagoner is a term used to describe people who only root for a team when it is successful. Typically, a bandwagoner roots for any team or athlete that is favored to be crowned Champion.

When you stop and look at it from a general standpoint is it so wrong to be a bandwagoner? For anyone who is a fan of teams like the Philadelphia 76er’s or the Sacramento Kings the past ten years knows only the heartbreak of watching your team miss the playoffs year after year. Then there are my Brooklyn Nets who moved to Brooklyn from New Jersey, where they went to the NBA Final’s twice, and have not found much success in the league. Led by someone that I can only call a mad man, the Nets mortgaged their future for an instant shot at a title and came up very short.

Trading away Derrick Favors, Devin Harris, and some other players and picks the Nets picked up Deron Williams with a year and a half left on his contract. In order to get him to resign we traded the sixth pick in the 2012 NBA draft, which would become Damian Lillard for Gerald Wallace, who we later traded along with several draft picks and other lackluster players for over the hill Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce. Along the way we traded another draft pick to the Atlanta Hawks along with several expiring contracts for just past his prime Joe Johnson.

While these players all had great careers before; they came together at a time when none of them could carry a team and quite frankly weren’t together long enough to build any sort of chemistry. Paul Pierce was gone after a season and Kevin Garnett was gone midway through his second season with the team. While those two were leaving, Deron Williams and Joe Johnson entered the downswing of their careers, due to nagging injuries and age, on massive contracts that had to be bought out to get rid of them. At the end of the day all the Nets succeeded in doing was trading away promising pics for fading talent that got them to the conference finals, one time, where they lost to the Heat in the sole season this four players played together.

You may be wondering what this brief history of New Jersey’s terrible mismanaging has to do with bandwagoning? That answer is simple, how else am I supposed to enjoy the game I love while my team hovers near the basement as they struggle through another set of down years? In 2010 the then New Jersey Nets tied for the seventh worst record in NBA history and then brought in all of the talent mentioned above and looked destined to surge on to greatness. Instead fans of the team get to watch as they once again race to the bottom, however this time they do not have a draft pick to use until 2019.

That means three years until Nets fans have a chance to draft players that can be difference makers. That means multiple years of attempting to build through the draft before the team is competitive again. That means that fans of the Nets will not be able to root for a team that has a chance of even making the playoffs until a very long time from now. Should those fans sit around twiddling their thumbs as they watch the front offices of their teams destroy chances by jumping at silly get rich schemes?

If you want to be upset with anyone about bandwagoners hate the front offices of terrible teams that make terrible decisions in an effort to win now, because if you stop to think about it, had the Nets kept their cool and took their time, they could have a team built around Damian Lillard, Derrick Favors, and Brook Lopez. Instead Brook Lopez stands along with Thaddeus Young as stars amongst a garbage heap, although rookie Rondae Hollis Jefferson looks like he may have a promising career with all that athleticism.

So in short, the next time you start to make fun of someone who roots for a team that has the potential to win it all, stop and think about what they have been through to get to this point. Everyone is fighting a battle that you know nothing about, and for some of us it’s watching our favorite team make personnel decisions that leave us wanting to egg their shiny new stadium and vote to have the team’s owner and management deported, even if they are U.S. citizens.