After a 98-88 victory over the Wizards was done, Williams sniffed some Brooklyn attitude about the journeyman guard trying to mess with him. “He had some boys in the crowd he wanted to impress while he still can, in the little minutes he’s going to get this year,” Williams said.

Opening night comes on Nov. 1, comes with the New York Knicks here, but Monday was a threshold for the Nets. For nine long years, this franchise chased a basketball game here and it finally happened. It didn’t matter that the players could still hear drilling in warmup lines, that workers were still banging hammers on stairways leading down to the court.

Williams called it a touch of “chaos” still, but 14,219 fans for a preseason game was unheard of across the river in Jersey on most regular-season nights. Brooklyn is a basketball borough, and it’ll be demanding of Williams and these Nets. The novelty will wear off, and the Nets will need to beat the Knicks and be competitive in the Eastern Conference to become a credible entity here. King has assembled a fine roster for Johnson and Williams, and there’s immense pressure on them to deliver.