To fully appreciate how Jalen Brunson has redeemed the New York Knicks, who on Thursday night saw off the Philadelphia 76ers to reach the last eight of the NBA playoffs, you must understand the context and history of point guard for the team. After team owner James Dolan was handed the Knicks on a silver platter by his Cablevision-founding father in the late 1990s, the Knicks slipped into chaos and degradation. The conspicuous void at the point guard position reflected the lack of leadership on and off the court. This exacerbated the team’s dysfunction, as they lacked a true floor leader to galvanize the mismatched pieces.
Until Brunson’s arrival, that is. The 27-year-old isn’t merely turning the Knicks into a contender. He is fulfilling the dreams of generations of Knicks fans who have only known losing or forgotten what winning feels like. The son of Rick Brunson, the former Knicks third-string point guard and John Chaney protégé known for a journeyman career full of hustle, defense and energy, Jalen shares his father’s role-playing heart while imbued with the championship desire and failure of Rick’s doomed 1999 finals squad. Little Jalen was bouncing around that last great Knicks team, attached to his father’s hip at team practices, where Tom Thibodeau was an assistant coach to Jeff Van Gundy, and Leon Rose, Rick’s agent, were mainstays.
Rose is now president of the Knicks, Thibodeau is the team’s head coach and Jalen Brunson their star player. The trio are uniquely positioned to continue the mission of that 1999 team, a group of lovable dudes who played for each other and a take-no-shit head coach.
Brunson has three men in his corner – his father, Rose and Thibodeau – who can provide unique points of view on the Knicks’ recent failures and, further back, their glory days. No Knicks player since 1999 has had that luxury of history and context. Thibodeau is a taskmaster but he has also instilled discipline in a franchise that has too often descended into disarray. As for Rose, where Dolan’s previous front-office executives targeted washed-up former stars and mediocre stopgaps to man the point, Rose chose Brunson based on fit. Rick was Rose’s first client. The two know each other with unmatched familiarity. Rose knew Jalen possessed the potential to fill the team’s most glaring hole because Rick had trained him since birth.
Even the wildly unpopular Dolan deserves some credit for not meddling and screwing everything up. And who could forget Mark Cuban and Nico Harrison at Brunson’s former team, Dallas, who repeated the Steve Nash sin yet again, letting their point guard and second-best player walk for nothing in free agency? It took a seismic stroke of luck for the Knicks and poor decision-making from the Mavericks to find Brunson with the Knicks.
Brunson is what Knicks fans wanted out of Stephon Marbury, who was run out of town in 2009: a kid from the tri-state area who grew up a Knicks fan and came home to take the team to the next level. Luckily for New Yorkers, Brunson has been much better than the kid from Coney Island. This makes Marbury’s recent return to the Garden, completing his Knicks circle as Brunson’s biggest supporter, all the more satisfying.
Brunson has stepped into his role as a hometown hero with a game antithetical to the modern guard. He relies on footwork, IQ and counters to score the rock at a level good enough for the best guard in the NBA. After losing his teammate and fellow All-Star Julius Randle for the season, Brunson has taken on an even bigger role on offense while increasing his assists to make his teammates better.
He has already set the franchise playoff scoring record with 47 points in the Game 4 win over the 76ers, which gave New York a 3-1 series lead. After taking his team to the second round of the playoffs in his first year with the Knicks, he has his sights set on a finals run in year two. He’s done all this with Randle out for most of the regular season and all of the postseason. Brunson and the Knicks’ nine-man rotation lack a single lottery pick. It’s just a bunch of late first-rounders and former second-round picks playing the best basketball of their careers, all off the majesty of Brunson’s ascent to stardom.
Even though it’s only his second season in New York, it feels like Brunson has been throwing himself into the blue and orange gauntlet for a decade. Playing his entire career in Madison Square Garden already feels like a certainty. Watching Brunson play basketball in a Knicks jersey feels like Larry Johnson’s four-point play and Allan Houston’s game-winning floater. It feels like Kristaps Porzingus before he took off for his final dunk with the Knicks. And it feels like the second before Adrian Wojnarowski’s tweet announcing Kevin Durant’s signing with the Brooklyn Nets. In short, it feels like hope.
While it’s easy to get lost in the mythology of the Knicks, every epic has an origin story. Thanks to the internet, Brunson’s is memorialized in perpetuity. It is found in a grainy video taken in the early 2000s when Rick’s playing career was over, and his coaching career with his son was just beginning. Rick and his wife, Sandra, are running Jalen through reps on an empty basketball court. The skinny preteen Jalen appears exhausted, yet he perseveres, dribbling up and down the court before launching into a pull-up jumper. Rick admonishes him to follow through on his shot. But it’s more than the follow through. It’s a lesson in consistency, in legitimacy. Rick can be overheard repeatedly telling his son that everything he does “has to be legit”.
Before the video fades to black, Jalen digs deep, tightening his dribble, squaring up to the basket, and following through on his shot. Even then, you can see the man he will become. In that simple, one-minute video, Knicks fans can see the future. And after holding their breath for 20 years, they can finally exhale.
