Brunson has led the Knicks to the NBA Finals for the first time this century -- if he pulls off a title, he'll cement his place in franchise history




Most NBA teams connect with their history almost passively. It's a shadow they live within. You walk past the Michael Jordan statue when you enter the United Center, but when you walk inside, you're watching a Bulls team entirely disconnected from everything he accomplished. Time marches forward.

That's not quite how it works for the Knicks. One of the best players in franchise history -- the legendary Walt Frazier -- has been the team's primary broadcast analyst for almost 40 years. Former All-Star Allan Houston has been a fixture in the front office across several regimes. Look in the stands in almost any meaningful game and you'll see a cavalcade of former players. Many of them, like Stephon Marbury and Carmelo Anthony, were fairly divisive among the fanbase during their careers. They get raucous applause now. Once a Knick, always a Knick.

It creates a somewhat unique dynamic when you remember their most notable shared trait. Most of these former Knicks didn't win championships, but their presence at these games, at least spiritually, makes it feel as though they're still trying. Generation after generation of Knicks building on one another, pouring whatever of themselves they can still offer from the sidelines into the Herculean task of ending the 53-year championship drought they couldn't snap on the court. It's all chronicled by Frazier, the team's last great champion, hoping to finally pass the baton.

Time doesn't march forward for the Knicks. We're watching the 53rd season of the same show here. The principal cast may change every few years, but the greats still show up for the biggest episodes. No one wants to miss the moment that the last lingering plot thread resolves. Bernard King got hurt before he could do it. Patrick Ewing came agonizingly close. Anthony never had the right teammates.

The Knicks have spent the bulk of this century trying to import an outsider capable of carrying them across the finish line. They tried and failed to sign Kobe Bryant in 2004, punted two whole seasons to carve out the cap space needed to chase LeBron James in 2010, met with him again in 2014, and were then spurned so famously by Kevin Durant in 2019 that they needed to do damage control by putting out the narrative that they actually weren't willing to pay him a max contract anyway.

The attempts felt like shortcuts, and that's part of why Jalen Brunson resonates so much with this fanbase. He wasn't someone else's icon gracing Madison Square Garden with his presence. He arrived in New York with one year of experience as a full-time starter. He's the sort of small guard who spends his whole career hearing about how players like him don't lead champions. He may have started his career in Dallas, but he hardly even felt like an outsider. His father, Rick Brunson, played for the Knicks' 1999 Finals team. His godfather, Leon Rose, runs the team.

TBD in NBA Finals
He was family to the fanbase and city from the moment he arrived. After years of rejection, someone actively chose the Knicks, knowing fully what that choice meant. He grew from underdog to superstar while wearing the blue and orange, sharing the journey with both the fans and the icons watching from the stands. He's now led the Knicks to nearly as much sustained success as any of them. His arrival coincided with the team's first four-year playoff streak this century. They've won at least one round in all four of those postseason trips. No other team in the NBA today can say the same. He's now a three-time All-NBA player.

The on-paper résumé doesn't quite stack up to the best of the best yet. Ewing and Frazier hold most of the team records. Willis Reed won their only MVP. King and Anthony won their two scoring titles. Brunson is still in his 20s. He might have another decade on this team to go. That will be his accumulation phase. He has a bigger job now, the one that Ewing and Anthony and King couldn't finish. Even Reed and Frazier did so under different circumstances. They weren't burdened by the 50 years of history that followed them.

Brunson, named the Eastern Conference Finals MVP on Monday after New York swept Cleveland, has carried that weight as comfortably as any Knick ever has. Though it came with admittedly lower stakes, he got to have his Willis Reed moment when he returned from a foot injury at halftime to lead the Knicks to a Game 2 win over the Pacers in the second round back in 2024. Anthony once drew plaudits for taking $5 million below his max salary to return to the Knicks as a free agent in 2014. When Brunson extended a decade later, he left somewhere between $37 and $113 million on the table, depending on how you're defining the term.

That extra financial flexibility helped the Knicks build the juggernaut they have now, one that has reached new heights this postseason in part by asking him to do less offensively. His shot attempts, his dribbles and his time of possession are all down compared to previous postseasons, but the results speak for themselves. They're all that matter here.

He's closer now than most of his peers in recent Knick history have ever gotten. This is only New York's third trip to the Finals since their 1973 championship. The hardest part is still ahead. Either the San Antonio Spurs or Oklahoma City Thunder will be favored in the NBA Finals. They have the two best players in the NBA. Ewing lost his best title shots to all-time greats like Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon and Tim Duncan. Brunson will have to beat either Victor Wembanyama or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander four times out of seven to get the Knicks to the promised land. Fitting that one of the NBA's smallest players now has to play the role of giant slayer.

If he does so, he'll have climbed one of the last great mountains in American professional sports. In the context of the market and the history, very few NBA championships have ever meant what this one would. Maybe Cleveland in 2016, given its citywide drought and LeBron's prodigal son story, could measure up to a Knicks title. You'd be hard pressed to find another other comparable NBA champions. The more accurate comparisons would be the Boston Red Sox or Chicago Cubs in Major League Baseball, or, one day, the Detroit Lions, Minnesota Vikings or Buffalo Bills in the NFL.

That single trophy means more than anything else a Knick could ever achieve. If Brunson lifts it, it won't matter that Ewing was here longer or that Reed and Frazier got there first. It's such a singularly significant moment in the history of the team and the sport that the person who gets there ultimately stands alone as the greatest player in Knicks history. He's the one all of those legends have spent years waiting for, the one ready to take the baton from Frazier. Brunson is now four wins away from immortality.

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