Nots (Nets basketball team nickname)

The New Jersey Nets team joined the NBA in 1976 and has been an underperforming professional basketball franchise for most of its NBA existence. The nickname “Nots” has been used since at least the 1980s.
   
Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov expressed interest, in September 2009, in buying the club. The Nots received the additional nickname of the Nyets—Russian for the word “no.”
     
 
Wikipedia: New Jersey Nets
The New Jersey Nets are a professional basketball team in the National Basketball Association that plays in the Eastern Conference’s Atlantic Division. They are currently based in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and play their home games at the Izod Center. The team is planning to relocate to the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, but legal issues have complicated the move.
 
17 March 1990, The Press (Atlantic City, NJ), “Sixers pound Nets” by Ed Hilt:
They are the worst thing to happen to New Jersey since high insurance rates and ocean pollution. They are the New Jersey Nets, who might be more appropriately renamed the New Jersey Nots.
   
New York (NY) Daily News
ON THE MARK
BY MARK KRIEGEL
Friday, November 10th 1995, 4:03AM
(...)
Just love how the New Jersey Nots put out a little bitty press release after business hours saying that Derrick Coleman has a heart condition, but it’s nothing too serious and he’d be back in two to four weeks.
     
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
New Jersey misses nets
Nuggets limit guest to 31 points in first half of win
By Chris Tomasson, Rocky Mountain News
Published January 26, 2008 at 12:45 a.m.
Kiki Vandeweghe, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to resurrect a team that has become the New Jersey Nots.
 
The woeful Nets strolled into the Pepsi Center playing no defense. On Friday night, just to mix things up, they played no offense and lost their eighth straight, 100-85 to the Nuggets.