After another disappointing loss early in the season, Jalen Brunson stood in front of the locker room preparing to speak to the media in Milwaukee.
When the point guard turned around, he was as straight-faced as ever after the Knicks lost their fourth in six games and put on a homemade T-shirt, all black with a white top. The letters look like they came straight from a Vistaprint press. .
Brunson has a familiar saying written on his chest: The magic is in the work.
“It’s a Sandra Brunson piece,” Brunson said, referring to his mother, who emblazoned the family’s long-standing motto on the crew neck. Of course, “the magic is at work” is not an original idea of the Brunson family.
Anyone who knows Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau will have a Pavlovian relationship with this expression. These 19 letters make up his favorite sentence. Find anyone who is around a coach and mention the magic of the job, and be prepared to have that person laugh at Thibodeau or get an inside look at a man who has dedicated his life to basketball.
Brunson’s father, Rick, played for Thibodeau years ago when Thibodeau was a player, and Thibodeau personally tore down that narrative when he was an assistant coach with the Knicks in the 1990s. . For twenty-five years, he and Sandra had repeated this phrase to Jalen. Rick is something of a Thibodeau loyalist. He played for him in New York, where the two grew closer. He served as an assistant coach to Thibodeau during his first stop as a head coach in Chicago, his second stop in Minnesota and now his third stop in New York.
During those years Rick would take his son to the office. Thibodeau remembers the 1990s, when Jalen was not only too small to be a star but not old enough to attend elementary school, showing up to Knicks practices with a ready-made impression of the team’s top players. He played Latrell Sprewell, Allen Huston, Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson.
“He was very accurate,” Thibodeau said. “He was about six years old and he already knew all the moves.”
Thibodeau would never have known at the time that he would eventually become the team’s head coach. Not to mention, he couldn’t have predicted that Rick’s son would become the leader of his team and, starting Thursday, officially become an NBA All-Star for the first time in his career.
No one in the faction could have guessed that the team’s engineer would be Rick Brunson’s then-agent Leon Rose, who would break the seemingly never-ending void among the Knicks fan base. Resting depressive mood. He ended up working at the CAA, which also represented Thibodeau, running the agency’s basketball department before the Knicks hired him as team president in 2020.
When Jaren signed with the Knicks two years ago, he gave his one-word answer: “Family.” Not only did he want to work for his father; Rose was there too. He wanted to play for Thibodeau, a huge basketball fan he’s known since he was a little kid. The Knicks didn’t poach a player who was equally coveted elsewhere.
Brunson’s former team, the Dallas Mavericks, chose not to offer him a contract extension that would have been about half of the $104 million contract he ultimately signed with the Knicks, a contract that was widely criticized as overpaying . Today, this is one of the most team-friendly trades in the NBA.
This is not the trajectory of a typical All-Star. Brunson was a three-year college player, a second-round pick who didn’t play much as a rookie and didn’t start regularly until his fourth pro season. He was shorter than his peers, could barely dunk, and was more obsessed with pivots than crossovers.
Of all the existing parallel universes, this is the only team where Brunson becomes an All-Star, playing for the team president and coach in the city while also becoming the face of organizational transformation. However, it is happening.
When the NBA announced its All-Star reserves on Thursday, two Knicks players popped up: Julius Randle, now making his third All-Star selection in four seasons; Brunson , he was selected to the All-Star for the first time.
Randall’s appearance was also unusual. The Los Angeles Lakers drafted him in the 2014 lottery but let him become a free agent after his first NBA contract expired. He signed a one-year self-imposed contract with the New Orleans Pelicans, but he too was fired after the season. After the pursuit of Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant ended and the two stars left for the Brooklyn Nets, the Knicks turned to Randle and gave him a short-term deal for less money.
No one could have imagined that four and a half years later, a New York basketball team would occupy the heart of the city led by two All-Stars—neither of whom was Durant or Irving.
“The special thing is they’re homemade,” Thibodeau said. “It’s not something they’re given, it’s something they deserve. We’re proud of them.”
This shouldn’t have happened. Yet, we watch the same events unfold night after night.
The Knicks have a record of 32 wins and 17 losses this season and have won nine consecutive games. It’s like they chose to stop failing. Since Jan. 1, they are 15-2. Every night, someone new gets hurt, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Mitchell Robinson underwent ankle surgery in December, but the team has been holding out for Isaiah Hartenstein to prove his first-line quality. Lately, lists are falling apart.
Less than a week ago, Randle dislocated his shoulder. He missed Monday’s first game. That night, OG Anunoby had to sit out with elbow inflammation. He hasn’t played in three games since. A day later, Quentin Grimes injured his knee, now sprained, and is unable to compete.
The Knicks were without four rotation players Thursday night. Thibodeau broke the clock and ran 59 minutes in his favorite way during regulation. However, they just kept winning.
They beat the Charlotte Hornets on Monday, the venerable Utah Jazz the next night, and beat the exciting Indiana Pacers 109-105 on Thursday after trailing by 15 points. Next comeback.
Somehow, the Knicks, a team that has been associated more with dirt than players for the past 23 years, are half a game away from second place in the Eastern Conference. It’s hard to go anywhere else but Brunson.
Thursday’s performance was his masterpiece: 40 points against a relentless defense. With the Knicks short-handed, the Pacers double-teamed him from the start. They got into a physical altercation with Brunson, as Brunson usually does with his opponents—so much so that toward the end of the game, Brunson got a slap in the face and fell to the floor until the buzzer. The sound was swallowed.
Brunson scored on the next play to give New York a one-point lead with less than two minutes left.
“An A, a B, it doesn’t matter. This guy is an All-Star. He’s having an MVP-level season right now,” Donte DiVincenzo said. “He should be player of the month. What else can I say? This guy is doing everything he can to help us win games. It’s not easy right now, Julius is down, OG is down, Mitch is not here. Everything.” It was all against us, but he still wanted us to win the game.”
Brunson averaged 27.1 points per game this season, a career high, and dished out 6.4 assists. On Thursday, he scored 40 points for the fifth time in the Knicks’ first 49 games. He has left more than 30 times, 19 times. Of the 534 players with a point so far this season, only three (a trio of MVP candidates) have more total points than Brunson: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander , Giannis Antetokounmpo and Lue Ka Doncic.
This story, this career is destined to happen only in dreams.
If Rose hadn’t come to the Knicks, if he hadn’t hired Thibodeau immediately after arriving, if Thibodeau hadn’t gotten close to Rick 25 years ago, if Rick hadn’t become Rose’s lifelong loyalist, if Rick hadn’t The relationship with Rose’s children is not yet so close, Rose’s son Sam has not yet grown up to become Jalen’s agent, and a player with this background will probably not become an All-Star for this team.
But, somehow, it happened. Brunson has become one of the most unlikely All-Star players in the NBA and is the 21st second-round pick to make the All-Star Game since the league implemented a two-round draft in 1989. Somehow, the Knicks also took his place.
They got his best friends from Villanova: DiVincenzo, Josh Hart and Ryan Arcidiacono. Somehow, all of these players became obvious roster spots. Somehow, they were able to add Anunoby, who personified this team’s new identity: hard-nosed, defensive-minded, team-oriented.
It starts at the top.
The Knicks went to great lengths to sign Thibodeau-type players: guys who care about defense first, guys who will rush into the stands with three minutes left in a 20-point game. But it helps when your best players play like that.
“When your All-Stars and your leaders do that, it sets the standard,” Hart said. “But it’s something that every one of us is proud of.”
In a league where some teams institute rules prohibiting players from grabbing the ball in training simply because they can’t risk injury to their leading players, Brunson takes charge in training. He is one of two people on the team, the other being Arcidiacono, who does the job. He leads the league in offensive fouls. He’s a star who sees himself as a role player, probably because he’s not supposed to go beyond that.
He shouldn’t go to 40 that often. He shouldn’t be the guy Knicks fans stay up late for just to silence them.
After Thursday’s win over the Pacers, MSG’s Alan Hahn conducted a typical postgame in-court interview with Brunson, the audio of which played throughout the arena and on television. Of course, this isn’t your usual game.
Facing a swarming defense, Brunson just scored 40 points. Just a few hours ago, he was officially selected to the All-Star Game. Attendance numbered 20,000, the most raucous crowd at Madison Square Garden so far this season. When the Knicks are good and fans know it, these games become a different kind of event.
After the game, most of the crowd didn’t leave. Instead, they waited for Brunson to begin the interview. Hahn asked about that night and how Brunson finally sneaked into the All-Star team after being tagged as a token snub a season ago. But even with the microphone on, you could barely hear Hahn as thousands of fans in the arena screamed “MVP!” chants.
Brunson, not known for public displays of emotion, choked up. He couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“The whole experience was cool, how we won, obviously what happened before the game,” Brunson said. “You’re always working on some moment, but you never know how to react when it happens. It’s special.”
That moment wasn’t just about Thursday night, it wasn’t just about a team that looked like the best in the NBA in a month, and it wasn’t just about a player who revitalized a once-bad team. , and incredibly rose to the elite level. Make no mistake: The Knicks have been looking for an All-NBA player since Rose took over the front office four years ago, and the conversation needs to be reframed. It’s definitely not a search for a star;This is a search other Star.
No one could have seen this coming, except for one or three people who knew Brunson from preschool.
“There’s always naysayers,” Thibodeau said. “And he always proves them wrong.”
(Jalen Brunson Photo: Sarah Steele/Getty Images)
