He went from hoop dream to hoop meme.
Eight years after an exasperated Knicks fan infamously sold his “fanhood” on eBay because the team was so bad, insists he’s not crying foul now that they’ve cruised into the NBA Finals.
“I have zero regrets,” turncoat Evan Perlmutter told The Post, after the Knicks clinched their first appearance in the championships since 1999.
The sports marketing exec from Long Island auctioned off his lifelong loyalty to the home team in 2018.
His “mounting frustration” had grown steadily as the powerhouse team of the 90s — with players like Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson, whose posters adorned his childhood room — devolved into a league laughingstock.
The frustrated 40-year-old fan blamed the team’s front office, saying “the circus . . . started from the top.”
So in one final act of desperation, he wrote an impassioned 2,000-word cry for help on eBay, entitled, “Infuriated New York Knicks fan has had enough, selling my fanhood.”
It caught the attention of a southern California YouTuber named James Riedel, who bid a cool $3,450 — on the condition that Perlmutter become a Los Angeles Lakers fan.
He did so gladly.
“I really made him a Lakers fan,” Riedel, 30, triumphantly told The Post, noting the 2020 championship win that Perlmutter relished.
Perlmutter, a former Madison Square Garden ad-sales employee, says he’s never looked back.
“All the coaches the Knicks went through, the horrible trades, the management, how they treated the fan base year over year, decade after decade, added up,” he said.
But as the Knickerbockers this month bulldozed through one playoff opponent after another (and the Lakers were unceremoniously knocked out in round 2), he’s begun to pay the price.
“You know you want to root for the Knicks now” and other taunting texts from friends are pouring in.
Still, the traitor won’t back down.
“It’s a false sense of the team being good,” he sniffed. “The cards have fallen in their favor. They’re more lucky than good.”
And he had this prediction for Knick fans: “The Knicks aren’t going to win the finals.”
But “The Damn Knicks,” a short film by Knick fan and filmmaker Bobby Friedman loosely based on Perlmutter’s life, has a different ending: The New Yorker who sell his Knicks loyalty becomes the laughing stock of the basketball world when the team turns itself around.
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
