TTo fully appreciate how Jalen Brunson redeemed the New York Knicks, who defeated the Philadelphia 76ers on Thursday night to reach the final eight of the NBA playoffs, you need to understand the context and history of point guard for the team. After team owner James Dolan was given the Knicks on a silver platter by his father, the founder of Cablevision, in the late 1990s, the Knicks fell into chaos and relegation. The glaring void at the point guard position reflected the lack of leadership on and off the court. This exacerbated the team’s dysfunction, as they had no real floor leader to galvanize the mismatched pieces.
At least until Brunson’s arrival. The 27-year-old isn’t just turning the Knicks into a contender. He fulfills the dreams of generations of Knicks fans who have only known losing or forgotten what winning feels like. The son of former Knicks third-string point guard and John Chaney protégé Rick Brunson, known for a journeyman career full of hustle, defense and energy, Jalen shares his father’s role-playing heart while imbued with championship desire and the failure of Rick’s doomed 1999 Finals selection. Little Jalen bounced around on that last great Knicks team, attached to his father’s hip during team practices, where Tom Thibodeau was assistant coach to Jeff Van Gundy, and Leon Rose, Rick’s agent, were mainstays goods.
Rose is now president of the Knicks, Thibodeau is the team’s head coach and Jalen Brunson is their star player. The trio is uniquely positioned to continue the mission of that 1999 team, a group of sweet guys who played for each other and a no-shit head coach.
Brunson has three men in his corner — his father, Rose and Thibodeau — who can provide unique viewpoints on the Knicks’ recent failures and, further down the line, their glory days. No Knicks player since 1999 has had that luxury of history and context. Thibodeau is a teacher, but he has also brought discipline to a franchise that has too often fallen into disarray. As for Rose, where Dolan’s previous front office executives focused on washed-up former stars and mediocre stopgap solutions to get to the point, Rose chose Brunson based on suitability. Rick was Rose’s first client. The two know each other with an unparalleled 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 interfering and ruining everything. And who could forget Mark Cuban and Nico Harrison at Brunson’s former team, Dallas, who repeated Steve Nash’s sin and let their point guard and second-best player walk for nothing in free agency? It took a huge windfall for the Knicks and some poor decision making from the Mavericks to land Brunson with the Knicks.
Brunson is what Knicks fans wanted from Stephon Marbury, who was driven 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. Fortunately 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 Brunson’s biggest supporterall the more satisfying.
Brunson has reprized his role as a hometown hero with a game that is the antithesis of 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 teammate and fellow All-Star Julius Randle this 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, giving 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 while Randle was out for most of the regular season and the entire postseason. Brunson and the Knicks’ nine-man rotation is missing 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 riding on the majesty of Brunson’s rise to stardom.
Even though it’s only his second season in New York, it feels like Brunson has been throwing himself into the blue-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 game and Allan Houston’s. game winning floater. It feels like Kristaps Porzingus before he left for him last dive with the Knicks. And it feels like the second one before it Adrian Wojnarowski’s tweet announcing Kevin Durant’s signing with the Brooklyn Nets. In short, it feels like hope.
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While it’s easy to get lost in the mythology of the Knicks, every epic has an origin story. Thanks to the internet, Brunson is forever remembered. It is found in a grainy video created 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 lead Jalen through the reps on an empty basketball court. Skinny preteen Jalen appears exhausted, yet he hangs in, dribbling down the court before jumping into a pull-up jumper. Rick encourages him to continue his shot. But it’s more than the sequel. It is a lesson in consistency, in legitimacy. Rick can be heard repeatedly telling his son that everything he does “has to be legal.”
Before the video goes black, Jalen digs deep, sharpens his dribble, aims for the basket and tracks 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 twenty years, they can finally exhale.