Before this season began, the Mavericks had a chance to offer Jalen Brunson a four-year, $55 million contract extension. They chose not to, which made sense. He was coming off a poor playoff series against the Clippers, during which he scored 18 total points in the series’s last four games.
The opportunity to lock Brunson up came again several months later, when the Mavs offered that same contract after the trade deadline because doing so before would’ve prevented them from including him in a potential deal for a star. The NBA is a business, but the Brunson family took this personally, as is their right.
While Brunson broke out as a playoff star—he averaged 21.6 points in 18 games as the Mavericks’ clear second-best player on a surprising run to the Western Conference finals—Rick Brunson, Jalen’s father, gave ESPN’s Tim McMahon some insight into how those contract talks with Dallas went down.
