The Knick with his own knack

Jalen Brunson joins the NBA playoff legends and does it his way.

Jalen Brunson

Everybody wants to know the “comp.” Is Caleb Williams the next Patrick Mahomes? Is Caitlin Clark the female Steph Curry? Is Mick Jagger the next….Mick Jagger? On and on.

The truth is that the best players, particularly in basketball, have their own stamp of authenticity. There was no real antecedent for Magic Johnson, for Larry Bird, certainly for Nikola Jokic. Originality was their unstoppable weapon. You can’t stop what you’ve never seen.

Jalen Brunson is sui generis. If he’d gone to Arkansas he would be sooey generis, but instead he went to Villanova. He is one of the best players in NBA history among those who were the fourth on their college team to get drafted. Mikal Bridges was picked 10th in the first round of the 2018 draft, by Philadelphia, and Donte DiVicenzo went 17th, to Milwaukee. The 30th pick was Omari Spellman, whom Atlanta drafted. Dallas took Brunson, three picks later.

The 2015 Kentucky team was similarly loaded, so much so that Devin Booker was the 13th pick but followed teammates Karl-Anthony Towns, Willie Cawley-Stein and Trey Lyles. But that Kentucky team did not win the NCAA championship. Villanova did win in 2018, by 17 over Michigan, as DiVincenzo brought 31 points off the bench. It also won in 2016, as Kris Jenkins beat North Carolina on a buzzer 3-pointer. Brunson and Josh Hart were in that starting lineup.

Brunson was widely admired as a canny point guard who made stars out of his teammates. He was also dismissed as too slight and too slow to make serious NBA money. Mark Gottfried, the former coach at Alabama and N.C. State, was a scout for the Mavericks at the time and campaigned for Brunson.

After four years Brunson had slogged his way to an identity. He was one of the league’s best sixth men, and in the 2022 playoffs he scored 41 against Utah and 31 against Golden State. By then it was obvious Luka Doncic would be dominating the ball for the foreseeable future, and just as obviously Brunson needed a team of his own. The Knicks, having hired Jalen’s dad Rick as an assistant coach, gave Jalen $104 million over four years.

On Wednesday night they take a 1-0 lead into the Eastern Conference second-round playoff series with Indiana, and Brunson also takes a streak of four consecutive 40-point playoff games. Three other NBA players have done that, Jerry West and Michael Jordan and Bernard King, and they had no obvious doppelgangers either.

West has the longest 40-point streak. He did it in every game of the Lakers’ six-game series win over the Baltimore Bullets in 1965. In fact, West averaged 46.3 points in those games, without a 3-point line, and went to the free throw line 95 times.

There have been many next-Jerry-Wests over the years, all of which were (A) white and (B) not Jerry West. At the moment we’re hearing a daily morning-TV debate about Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards. Is he Kobe or Michael? Well, at 22 Edwards is probably more efficient and more of a leader than either Bryant or Jordan was. He also is sharp enough to reject the premise, saying that Jordan was the all-timer and that he, Edwards, is barely out of the starting blocks. It’s difficult to understand why we must pigeonhole Edwards when we also have the option to enjoy him.

It’s also difficult to absorb how Brunson does what he does even when you watch him do it. He is lefthanded, which helps, and he has a deep gearbox. He can go from casual to urgent in a fraction of a second, and he gets to the hoop and scores on rims protected by men a foot taller. At 6-foot-2, he was sixth in the league in 2-point attempts, and he is just syncopated enough to draw 216 fouls while shooting.

Brunson sets all that up with a reliable 3-point shot, too, and yet he hits his teammates in stride. He isn’t dependent on the high pick-and-roll, but he knows how to use it. There’s just something different on every possession, and it all fits what the Knicks are about. DiVincenzo and Hart are again his teammates, and in the Game 1 win over the Pacers, the NovaKnicks totaled 92 points on 33 for 56 shooting. Brunson got to the foul line 14 times and made them all.

Hart, who at the moment has the highest playoff rebound average of anybody 6-foot-4 or under since Philadelphia’s Paul Arizin, is on his fourth NBA team. DiVincenzo is on his second, as is O.G. Anunoby. Isaiah Hartenstein, one of the two centers, is on his fifth franchise. The other center, Mitchell Robinson, was a second-round pick like Hartenstein, and so was Miles McBride, the top reserve guard. The Knicks do have another legitimate star, Julius Randle, but he’s been out since Jan. 27 with a dislocated shoulder. Together they’re defending, rebounding, coming together and certainly not load-managing. Brunson is averaging 43.8 minutes in the playoffs, Hart 46.6.

They have turned Madison Square Garden into a volcano of noise that was heard, or felt, in the early 70s and the mid-90s and very few other times. Tom Thibodeau, who is in charge of his third NBA team, has been allowed to coach non-negotiably. The Knicks won 13 of their final 18 games and won 50 games for the first time in 11 seasons.

Thibodeau was Doc Rivers’ defensive guy in Boston, when the 2008 Celtics won a championship by belaboring anyone with a basketball. This Knicks’ team ranks second in points allowed.

Amazing, how you can find superstars when you quit chasing them. The Knicks thinned out their roster to get Carmelo Anthony and recapture New York’s tabloid back page, at least for a minute. They hired Phil Jackson to make big franchise moves. They drafted Kristaps Porzingis, who won over the crowd with his futuristic game but then got hurt and demanded a trade. They somehow parlayed that into salary-cap space, but they truly nailed down their identity when they dealt R.J. Barrett, once the No. 2 pick in the draft, and shooter Emmanuel Quickley to Toronto for Anunoby, who is the epitome of the D-and-3 small forward that the NBA craves.

That move was almost as brazen as giving Brunson what they gave him. Did they foresee him becoming an All-Star? For that money, they must have, and they did get some inside info when they hired Rick Brunson (and lost a second-round pick on tampering charges when they signed Jalen). Rick spent nine years in the NBA and made 11 different stops, then was an assistant coach on six different NBA teams, coached Camden (N.J.) High, worked on the Virginia staff, and knew that his son was watching every move.

Jalen became a fixture in NBA locker rooms, cracking up coaches and players (one of which was Thibodeau, in Chicago) with his imitations of players. But he also studied his dad, noticed the way Rick had to strain and struggle to make rosters, and endure all the life disruptions whenever he failed. That sparked Jalen’s faithfulness to the game, and to a family mantra: “The magic is in the work.” Brunson led Stevenson to the Illinois 4-A high school title, as he scored 30 in the championship game. By then he was the top rated point guard in America and chose Villanova over Illinois.

Little did anyone know Villanova would be the petri dish for New York heroes, or that a 6-foot-2 lefty would become the most worshiped Knick since Patrick Ewing. It’s been a harrowing playoff ride, as all the memorable ones are. New York’s wins have been by margins of seven, three, five, three and four points. Who knows where this will go? Those who fill their own shoes usually find their own path.