From a tequila-soaked Knicks Finals Instagram Live to a 45-point Game 5 clincher, Jalen Brunson’s championship run has been packaged—almost impossibly—by the moments around him as much as by the stats. In New York’s 53-year wait, Brunson’s story is less about
Forty-eight hours after the NBA Finals ended. Mikal Bridges went live on Instagram—tequila in hand—and the stream turned into a kind of after-hours manifesto. He serenaded his dog. He bleated like a goat in reverence for Jalen Brunson. He needed five tries to pronounce Jeremy Sochan’s name. And he called Knicks owner James Dolan a “savage” for suggesting the team abstain from sex during its playoff run.
At one point. Bridges fired up his seldom-used X account to plead with someone to “take Mikal’s phone.” Of Brunson. Bridges urged the Knicks to “build that little big-headed ass a statue.” He also thanked Becky Hammon. the Hall of Famer who in 2023 suggested the Knicks would never win a title being led by someone Brunson’s size. “He ain’t going to tell y’all,” Bridges said. “He knows what she said. And it fueled him to go be great.”.
A few days later, Brunson was asked to confirm Bridges’s agave-soaked claim. “I said this after we won,” Brunson said. “I didn’t respond then, and I damn sure am not going to respond now. So you guys can take that and do what you want.”
In the days since. the Knicks’ championship—coming after a 53-year title drought—has felt different in a city where sports are split like bloodlines. New York has nearly nine million people. and in other leagues the fan base is divided: the Yankees and Mets. the Giants and Jets. Even the Rangers face competition from Islanders fans in the outer boroughs. The Knicks have none. They play in Manhattan. but their reach runs from the Bronx to Staten Island. and Spike Lee—describing the team as “us”—said. “We see ourselves in them.”.
For players ending that long wait with one of the most clutch Finals efforts in NBA history, the air around them has tightened.
Brunson averaged 32.6 points over five games in the Finals, connecting on 38.9% of his threes. The splits are sharper. In the first two quarters of the series’ games, he averaged 14.2 points on 39.7% shooting with a plus-minus ratio of −6.8. In the fourth quarter, he averaged 11.2 points on 51.4% shooting and finished at +7.
In the Game 5 clincher, Brunson scored 45 of the Knicks’ 94 points.
After the series, a dejected Spurs coach Mitch Johnson said, “He’s a heck of a player,” adding, “He deserves everything he’s got.”
Rick Brunson has seen his son’s clutch work from every angle—state championships, NCAA tournaments, NBA playoff games. Still, even from the bench, Rick struggled to process the scale of what he was watching. He saw the fallaway jumpers. the finger-roll layups. and the “triple move” Brunson used against 7′ 4″ Victor Wembanyama. creating the inch of space needed to get the ball to the backboard. During Jalen’s 15-point fourth quarter in Game 5, Rick felt himself on the edge of his cushioned seat.
“I couldn’t even comprehend it,” Rick said. “I was as in awe as everybody else.”
When asked what comes over him in those moments, Brunson credits work rather than luck. “When I’m in the gym by myself in the summertime, those are the moments I’m thinking about,” he said. “Where everything, every detail has to matter.”
He doesn’t describe fear the way people expect. “I don’t care about losing,” Brunson said—then corrected himself. “I do care about losing,” he said. “I just know how I work and I feel like if my mind is right and everything is right. then I’m not afraid to fail. I’m not afraid to lose in those situations. So it allows me just to be the best I can be and not care about the end result as long as the process is right.”.
In his case. the end result was a championship—and it has turned Brunson into the kind of debate that never quiets. Who is the greatest Knick of all time?. Walt Frazier and Patrick Ewing have strong arguments, but Brunson has a case. On a short list of the NBA’s greatest small guards. the conversation includes Tiny Archibald. Isiah Thomas. and Allen Iverson alongside Brunson. listed at (maybe) 6′ 2″.
His rise has been among the most improbable paths the league can produce: from second-round pick to the Mavericks’ second unit, from starter to superstar. In New York, that improbability has amplified into celebrity.
Days after the Finals clincher. a mural on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was updated with Brunson holding the Finals MVP trophy. Dozens of Brunson lookalikes—“or at least those who considered themselves ones”—showed up at Washington Square Park for a lookalike contest. (The winner. a cornrowed 5-year-old. earned a FaceTime from Brunson. not to mention a $5. 000 prize.) An online petition to change the name of the Hudson River to Brunson River has picked up hundreds of signatures.
Brunson’s public attitude stays anchored. “Honestly, I’m just really thankful that this organization, this city, this fan base took me in and I was able to achieve a goal that we all had,” he said. “That comes before anything.”
During the Finals. he was asked how a player with his accomplishments—McDonald’s All-American. two-time NCAA champion. consensus college basketball player of the year—could be so overlooked. In the middle of the question, Brunson cracked a grin as if he already knew the answer wouldn’t satisfy. “Everything,” he said.
When asked to explain, he offered a blunt drafting reality. “Obviously when it comes to drafting. or drafting in the first round. drafting in the lottery. the way it’s gone about is you’re trying to hit the jackpot. ” Brunson said. “So if you swing and miss, you swing and miss. But if you make contact, you could hit a home run.”.
He compared his own draft outcome to contact that never promised fireworks. “I feel like drafting me was kind of like hitting a single. You know what you’re going to get. And maybe that wasn’t worth swinging for the fences early. So if that’s the thought process, that’s on them. I can’t control that. The only thing I can control was everything that I did. I thought I put myself in the best position possible and I still was drafted in the second round.”.
Rick Brunson wasn’t surprised. He predicted it. “He said I was going second round, to Dallas,” Jalen said, recalling what his father told him days before the draft. Rick had seen the projections. Too small. Not athletic enough. A solid backup. He also knew many front offices would believe them.
“You have to know Jalen, understand Jalen,” Rick said. “And if you don’t and you just try to evaluate him from afar, you’re going to be wrong.”
Rick understood both his son and the NBA. A sturdy playmaker during four years at Temple, Rick played for eight teams in a nine-year NBA career, including two separate stints with the Knicks. In 2006, Rick was cut by the 76ers before the start of the season. At 34, he knew it was over.
“I didn’t have the desire to work as hard as I needed to,” Rick said. On a car ride home, he told Jalen he was retiring. In the backseat, the 10-year-old fought back tears.
For Rick, the NBA door closed. Another opened: a chance to be a more present father to Jalen and his sister. Erica. and a life in coaching. Not right away. Rick knew Jalen loved basketball, but he didn’t want him trapped in the sport too early. Soccer, baseball, and football came first. “Kids should enjoy sports when they are little,” Rick said. “Not be forced into them.”.
There was another reason. With basketball, Rick could see the talent and the success. Still, he wanted Jalen to experience failure. “You just can’t always be the best at something,” Rick said. “Because once failure hits, then how are you going to overcome that?”
His Pop Warner football coach was Vince Papale, the ex-Philadelphia Eagle of Invincible fame. Papale made every player play every position, and the team went 1–11. Rick loved every minute of it.
“It was great for Jalen,” Rick said. “He learned how to be in different positions, to be a good teammate. And he learned how to lose. The feeling of losing. And how much it makes you want to win.”
Jalen’s focus narrowed eventually. At age 8, Rick picked him up at a summer camp, where Jalen was in tears. The camp ended every day with a game of knockout and a shooting drill; that day. Jalen had been the last knocked out. Rick was puzzled. “Stop being a baby,” he told him. A camp coach pulled Rick aside with a different reading. “I was told, ‘He’s crying because he cares,’” Rick said.
The moment stuck. “I just remember thinking, Wow, it’s just a game,” Rick recalled. “But it meant so much to him.”
Rick shifted the job to himself. “I needed him to do it on his own,” he said. “I told him, ‘I’m not always going to be around. So you have to have self-motivation.’”
When Jalen missed shots, Rick accused him of not putting in the work. “It would frustrate him because I knew he was,” Rick said, “but I would just put it in his head that he wasn’t.”
That training carried into later years in visible, stubborn form. In 2007, Rick took a job as basketball operations manager at Virginia, and the family moved to Charlottesville. At UVA, Rick had access to a state-of-the-art facility—but he often wouldn’t let Jalen in there.
“ I wouldn’t let him in there,” Rick said. Most days, they trained outside on the cracked asphalt of a nearby high school. Rick wanted mental toughness. “I wanted to teach mental toughness,” he said. “Why would we be in air conditioning? Why can’t we go out in the hot sun?”
The work was tough, tense, and public when it had to be. Rick interrupted pickup games when he believed Jalen was playing too selfishly. then chewed him out for the same reason after a high school game. Still, the standard was constant: “If you want me to stop, I’ll stop,” Rick told him. Jalen never did.
“He was testing me, seeing if I was going to break,” Jalen said. “He was going to see if I was going to crack. It was mental warfare to see how I could push myself, because you can always get yourself to another gear.”
Watching the Game 5 eruption, Pat Ambrose felt the repetition of that mindset. For 22 years Ambrose served as head coach at Stevenson High in Lincolnshire. Ill. and four of those seasons were spent with Brunson. who moved to the Chicago suburb in 2010 when Rick landed an assistant coaching job with the Bulls. As a junior, Brunson scored 56 points against Whitney Young High, a team led by Jahlil Okafor.
“Okafor wasn’t Wemby,” Ambrose said. “But he was gigantic for a high school kid. And Jalen couldn’t be stopped.”
NBA superpowers can be named like genetics—Giannis Antetokounmpo’s explosiveness. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s body control. Nikola Jokic’s soft touch. Brunson’s are different. At the core: footwork. Veteran coach turned TV analyst Stan Van Gundy describes persistence as one. Mike Breen, the Knicks’ longtime broadcaster, calls it “an iron will.”.
At Temple. Rick played for John Chaney. who had a saying: The longer you stay on the floor. the longer you stay in the game. As the game moved above the rim. Chaney coached players to perfect playing beneath it. and Rick hammered that mindset into Jalen. Rick showed tape of Michael Jordan and had him study Kobe Bryant.
How did Jordan eventually get past the Pistons in the playoffs?. Rick said it was “playing off two feet.” How did Bryant take his game to a championship level?. “Playing off two feet,” Rick said. Brunson’s coach at Villanova, Jay Wright, shared the same philosophy: practices began and ended with footwork drills.
“He knew there would be people who are more athletic than we were,” Jalen said. “But we could overcome that with footwork.”
Breen’s description captures another part of what the league can’t measure. “Nothing affects what he wants to do, good or bad,” Breen said. “We don’t have stats to measure that stuff and he clearly has a mental strength and a will that’s stronger than most.”
The remarks about Bryant began as controversy. Breen once compared Brunson to Bryant early in his New York tenure. “It was blasphemy,” Breen joked. But he stands by it.
Brunson’s relationship with Bryant was brief but memorable. In high school, Brunson scored a pair of tickets to a Lakers-Bulls game, and after the game the two shook hands. Bryant handed Brunson a pair of his red Kobe 9s. One thing Bryant said stuck: “Why work if you don’t want to be the best?”
“Things weren’t going to be given to me,” Brunson said. “I had to earn everything. But anything was possible.”
His NBA career did include flashes of excellence that answered the early doubts. In Dallas. he rose from reliable rookie to top sixth man to Luka Dončić’s sidekick during the Mavericks’ run to the conference finals in 2022. Brunson averaged 21.6 points per game during those playoffs. signaling—at least to the Knicks—that he was ready for something bigger.
Even the contract story reads like timing working both ways. In 2021, Brunson wanted a four-year, $55 million extension. The Mavericks didn’t offer it. When they did, it was too late. Dallas could have beaten the four-year, $104 million contract New York gave Brunson in July 2022 but passed. It worked out. Since then, Brunson earned three All-NBA nods and now has Finals MVP.
The Knicks, Brunson said, “gave me the opportunity to seize the moment.” But he insists the alternative would not have ruined him.
“If I stayed in Dallas, I feel like that team, I would have made the best of it as much as I can,” Brunson said. “I would have been a star [in] my role as best I could.”
Would he have been happy playing second fiddle to Dončić?. “Absolutely,” Brunson said. “Understanding the player that he is and what he brought to the table. you were going to be on TV 30. 40 times just because of the level of player he was. So there was going to be opportunity for you to grow as a player as well. Being able to play with him and understand him and just help him out. It was the opportunity that I was ready for. It was the opportunity that I enjoyed and the role that I enjoyed because of the person he is and the player he is. So, yes, absolutely.”.
The day-to-day spotlight around Brunson keeps producing scenes that feel oddly in character. Before Game 3 against the Spurs. as Brunson wrapped up a practice-day press conference. Fat Joe—Bronx-born—had snuck into the room for a question. Minutes earlier. Joe had engaged with Knicks coach Mike Brown. getting Brown to agree to hand over an autographed pair of his signature PF Flyers. Catching Brunson’s attention proved harder.
“Hey Jalen,” Joe shouted. Brunson turned. “Hey Joe,” he said, and then stepped off the dais. “Damn,” Joe muttered. “I got treated like media.”
That’s Brunson: not easily impressed. When Brunson scans celebrity row at Madison Square Garden. his eyes skip past Chris Rock and Jerry Seinfeld and settle on Mariska Hargitay. star of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. “Love Mariska Hargitay,” Brunson said. The feeling is mutual. Hargitay is a fixture courtside at Knicks games. and Brunson later said he would like to make a guest appearance on the show.
“I think the amazing thing about watching Jalen play is that he has this quiet. deep knowledge that he was made for this moment. ” Hargitay said. “Or not that he was made. but that he built himself. piece by piece. day by day. hour by hour. for this moment. Whatever the moment may be, he knows he did the work to meet it.”.
Even in celebration, credit stays deflected. When he earns it, he doesn’t lean into it. The contract he signed in 2024—an extension worth four years and $156.5 million—was a kind of statement too. It was less money than he could have signed for a year later by $113 million. That decision created flexibility the Knicks needed to reshape the roster around him.
Pundits praised his selflessness, but Brunson framed it differently. “I signed for the most amount of money that was in front of me at that time,” he said. Waiting a year could have been more lucrative, but it also carried risk.
“If things go wrong, it can quickly go away,” Brunson said. “So being able to play with a free mind knowing that I had secured a good amount of money, it allowed me to play free as well. Besides, no matter how much money I would sign for, I don’t think my life changes that much day-to-day.”
For the franchise, the trophy is not just relief—it’s rewriting decades. In one series, Brunson erased the ghosts of ’94 and the disappointment of ’99. He papered over the sub-20-win seasons. the countless coaching changes. and more than two decades of failing to escape the second round. He erased the memory of John Starks’s blocked three. Patrick Ewing’s torn Achilles. and Carmelo Anthony’s failed return.
At City Hall—the last stop of the Knicks’ victory parade—Brunson offered a rare public rebuttal to critics. “There are people who have a lot of opinions out there, negative things,” he said. “But when you’re proving them wrong, you really don’t have to say s— to them.”
Many interpreted it as a response to Hammon, the Hall of Famer who said in 2023 that a title led by someone Brunson’s size would never happen. For sure, Brunson will never tell.
Jalen Brunson Knicks championship Finals MVP Mikal Bridges Becky Hammon 53-year title drought Game 5 45 points Rick Brunson New York sports