Jalen Brunson was already good in this town. There isn’t a restaurant anywhere on the island of Manhattan that wouldn’t buy his dinner the second he walked in the door. There isn’t a saloon anywhere in any of the five boroughs where he’d have to reach for his wallet when he orders a beer. If the proprietors don’t pick up the check, the customers will line up to do it.
That’s where he was when he was merely the best basketball player the Knicks have employed since Patrick Ewing. And all of that was prologue, until just before 5 o’clock Friday afternoon.
Now we are talking about a different level. Now we are having a separate conversation. Look, it’s impossible in good conscience to get too carried away when a man agrees to a contract extension that will pay him $156.5 million. We aren’t going to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Jalen Brunson’s great-grandkids are taken care of if he doesn’t ever earn another nickel after this contract.
Still …
This is 2024. This is the time of you get yours, I’ll get mine, and then I’ll hold out for a little more of mine. Big-ticket athletes pay attention to what other athletes in every sport earn. It’s why AAV is every bit as common an acronym in sports these days as RBI and PPG and QBR. It’s why athletes whose agents have already made them rich drop those agents in favor of Scott Boras, who (usually) makes them even more preposterously rich.
Yes, there have been exceptions. It was estimated by Business Insider that Tom Brady left between $60 million-$100 million on the table through the years for the same reason Brunson is leaving $113 million on that same table now: trying to help the Patriots (and the Knicks) squeeze as much talent as they could under the NFL (and NBA) salary caps.
Brady can open up his safe-deposit box and empty out his seven Super Bowl rings if he ever wonders if it was worth it. Brunson hopes that his largesse will be similarly rewarded; New York City, and Knicks, fans, would likely sign for one-seventh of Brady’s total at this point.
LeBron James has taken a few million less here and a few million less there over the years to help his teams’ flexibility. Patrick Mahomes restructured his massive deal with the Chiefs to keep them a destination for talent. Hell, when Reggie Jackson became a Yankee, he did so for $2.9 million — which was $2.1 million less than the Expos had guaranteed him, about $1.6 million less than the Padres.
Reggie bet on himself, and bet on the Yankees, and bet on New York, same as Brunson is doing for the Knicks. Although even inflation doesn’t convert $2.1 million in 1976 to $113 million in 2024 (for the record, it would be about $13 million).
decision. Charles Wenzelberg
And here’s the thing: if Brunson hadn’t agreed to this, would you really have held that against him? Yankees fans still adore Aaron Judge, but the only reason he’s a Yankee is because Hal Steinbrenner agreed to match penny for penny the $360 million offer he had in his pocket from the Giants. No need to begrudge Judge; if anything there have been times this year he’s seemed underpaid.
So forget Brunson’s willingness to part (or at least wait to earn back) with that $113 million, and how rare that is. Here’s the real takeaways:
1. He wants to be here. He wants to win a title as a Knick. He wants the Canyon of Heroes. And he wants to maximize the Knicks’ ability to do that.
2. He’s not just a leader because he scores the most, or because he’s the one who takes the technical free throws, or because he’s the one who patiently answers every question after every game without ducking out the side door to the bus.
Teammates notice this kind of stuff. Not surprisingly, Josh Hart took about 15 seconds to take to X and write “Build him a statue” and added an emoji with a teardrop.
That statue? It’ll be a given if the Knicks do win a third championship on Brunson’s watch, and the reason mostly will be because of what he does on the court to make that possible. Still, what he did Friday afternoon sent a message, both to his team and to whoever else across the league might be the final few ingredients allowing a date with the Canyon:
Some guys say they’ll do whatever it takes to win.
Some guys actually do those things. In this case, 113 million of those things.
