In the immediate aftermath of winning a championship, there’s utter jubilation. Once that initial high wears off after the ceremony and you start truly grasping what you just witnessed, the human mind naturally goes in a completely different direction.
You begin to think of those who were proven wrong.
Athletes always say after they win it all, “They didn’t believe in us,” or “What’re they gonna say now?” They feed off slander. Any time in life that you or something you care about gets disrespected, you long for the day that person has to eat crow and face the music. It’s just human nature.
For the basketball world, after the final buzzer sounded on June 13, that vitriol was directed towards one person.
Becky Hammon.
After a few months to really ponder things, my tone has shifted toward Becky, even if only slightly.
In that clip, Hammon expresses her opinion, which is based on the last 35 years of NBA basketball. Only one team has won a championship with a small guard as their best player since the Bad Boys Pistons from 1989-90, and even then there’s an exception because almost all of their identity came from smashmouth defense that had nothing to do with I.T.
You can’t win if your best player is small. The one exception was Steph Curry, who changed the game of basketball forever with the 3-point revolution. Unless you have a generational talent, an outlier with impact so drastic that you have to provide additional context for his cultural impact, your best player cannot be a small guard if you want to win a championship.
She was right about her overall premise. She was just wrong about the one person she singled out.
There are loads of small guards that Becky could’ve singled out. Ja Morant, Donovan Mitchell, Damian Lillard, Kyrie Irving, prime Russell Westbrook, Trae Young, De’Aaron Fox, etc. All of these guys were No. 1 options at or before the time of her remarks in December 2023. She has never, on record, talked about any of them as guys who can’t win.
Her problem was that she singled out Jalen Brunson. The odds were in her favor that she would never have to answer for her misdeeds, but her desire to ride the “Knicks for Clicks” wave was her undoing. Of all the typical, ball-dominant, non-winners in the world she could’ve ragged on, she decided to choose the only one who would ever be able to prove her wrong.
What Brunson did isn’t a blueprint. It isn’t a fluke. It wasn’t asterisk-worthy. It was a definitive statement that he belongs in the same conversation as Curry as an outlier, as a player who stands amongst giants and doesn’t back down, as a player whose playstyle allows him to overcome the true reality of smaller guards being at a disadvantage in the modern NBA.
For the last few years, we’ve heard the same phrase, “Who’ll be the next Jalen Brunson?” The answer is nobody will be, because if it were that easy to be Jalen Brunson, it wouldn’t be as utterly shocking to the NBA landscape as his lifting the Larry O’Brien Trophy turned out to be.
It’s a story that honestly goes a helluva lot deeper than even I can chronicle.
They say that the son of a role player is more likely to be the star than the son of a superstar, and that personifies the Brunson’s to a T. Role players know what held them back from stardom and can pass down to their sons what it means to not always be the best player on the court.
We saw the countless stories of Rick Brunson having a young Jalen work hard to master his craft, not take shortcuts, and do everything he can to overcome not always being blessed with the genetic makeup of a can’t-miss superstar.
You see it all throughout his career: how he had to constantly prove people wrong to get to the next level. He had to continue to work and change his game to prevent stagnation. He never accepted being shoehorned into a role. His work ethic is 1-of-1 and something that defines his path to where he is today.
The best example I can find of him evolving his own game to help him reach the next level is his floater evolution. Did you know that, back at Villanova, Brunson never shot floaters? Something that he’s currently the best at in basketball used to be totally alien to him.
Why did a young Brunson, who was still shorter than everyone else and should’ve had this in his toolbag as soon as possible, not attempt many? It was apparently a Villanova edict. Jay Wright did not want his guards to attempt floaters. For six consecutive years, the perennially contending Wildcats were dead last in floater attempts, something that was personal for Wright.
He wanted his players to finish off two feet. It was drilled into them in every practice from the moment they stepped on campus.
Watching Brunson’s college highlights, you can see the footwork that makes him who he is today. It reminds us that it usually takes a village to raise a warrior, as Brunson learned his impeccable footwork by developing in an incredible system for multiple years, while later adding the floater to take advantage of time and space. He was able to do both once he was given the freedom to.
When he did start attempting more floaters towards the end of his tenure in Dallas, you saw flashes of what he would become in New York. He was just hidden in a system that revolved around Luka Doncic. You saw what he could be when he was out, especially against the Jazz in the 2022 playoffs.
It was really a perfect storm when he came to New York. He got to return to a place he cared so deeply about, playing for the father who pushed him to be great, in a support system with many lifelong friends and family around the team; he got the ability to be ball-dominant, and he got to unleash the love child of the footwork he meticulously developed in college and the elite touch and jumper he got from grinding for more playing time in Dallas, all while doing the one thing he has done his whole life: prove everyone wrong.
Maybe we should’ve seen this all coming.
There’s also one aspect that I’ve neglected to mention that has nothing to do with his basketball ability, which he has in spades.
There’s an old-school form of leadership that Brunson possesses, one that you don’t see almost anywhere else that doesn’t have a grizzled, Udonis Haslem-esque veteran. Despite never winning an NBA championship or even coming close, he carried himself like one.
A perk of growing up as the son of an NBA player is that you will learn what to do and what not to do. Rick was certainly not infallible, and the mistakes he made growing up shaped Jalen into the non-problematic star he is today.
You look around the league, and you see divas. You see people who clap back on Twitter burners when they’re being slandered; you see people take thinly veiled shots at teammates through the media; you see players be hostile towards fans and the press; you see them get in trouble with the law in one of a million different ways. Distractions, controversy, and immaturity. All of that can consume you, especially in a media market like New York.
That doesn’t happen with the Knicks, and it starts with their captain and leader. They got to this point by playing like a team of brothers who all have each other’s backs, and it’s how they’ve managed to pick each other up after every early deficit and punch in the mouth they receive. No matter how bad it gets, they don’t point fingers.
It’s why I cannot stand people saying, “Well, if *insert point guard* had a supporting cast like that, they’d win too,” Kyrie Irving is someone who’s been used as a point of comparison with Brunson all season, with heated debates ongoing about who’s better.
It’s Brunson. Full stop. Irving was embarrassing every time he had to lead a team.
Don’t give me the crap that he didn’t get to lead a team like Brunson’s. Sure, the Baby Jays from 2017-19 weren’t an ideal situation, but it was one he could’ve embraced and turned into something beautiful if he gave it time. Hell, they were an ECF-caliber team despite Gordon Hayward’s leg being sideways and two of their starters not being old enough to drink. Instead, he was a diva and gave up on trying to be “the guy,” and settled for being a sidekick to KD and eventually James Harden in Brooklyn.
So to sum this all up, here’s something to leave you with.
Becky Hammon was right. Small guards almost never win titles as the top option. You do need a “1A dude”.
But she picked the wrong guy to single out, because history will remember Brunson as the exception to the rule, one that defied every odd and left the NBA world wondering how he did it.
