When Jalen Brunson takes the floor for Game 1 of the NBA Finals, he will be carrying more than a city's 27-year wait. He will be extending a family thread that runs straight through the New York Knicks. His father, Rick Brunson, was part of the franchise a generation ago, and reporters at Finals Media Day pressed Jalen on what it means for the Brunsons to be linked to the Knicks across two eras, nearly three decades apart.
Characteristically, he declined to make it about himself just yet. "I definitely don't remember" the team's last Finals run, Brunson said -- he was a toddler in 1999. "It's pretty surreal, I'm not going to lie. It's something I haven't really thought about. But I feel like once the season's over, once the career is over, it'll be time to think about the stuff that we were able to go through together. It's definitely a cool feeling."
That ability to compartmentalize has become Brunson's signature, and he leaned on it when asked whether the Finals stage will feel different. "Everything leading up to Game 1 is going to be heightened, just because of everything that goes on around it," he said. "But most importantly, when you prepare the right way, when you do your routines, you treat it like a normal game -- it allows it to be as normal as possible. For me, it's just making sure that I'm levelheaded and not changing anything just because it's the Finals."
The composure is hard-won. Brunson, now an MVP-caliber lead guard, revealed that he has wrestled with self-doubt at exactly one point in his career -- and it was not a small one. "The only time is probably my rookie year, playing pickup with the team in Dallas and watching Luka do his thing so effortlessly," he said. "It made me question myself, to see how hard I actually had to work to be in the position I wanted to be in."
If there is a chip on the Knicks' collective shoulder, Brunson articulated it plainly. "I feel like we've been doubted a lot. There's been a lot of noise on the outside," he said. "We could complain about it or do something about it, but we've always just gone back into the gym, worked on our game, and then when it came to games, we kept getting better and better. I think our mentality is in the right place at the right time. And we can't be satisfied just because we're here -- we've got to continue to keep learning."
He was asked, too, about the ghosts of 1999 -- Allan Houston and Patrick Ewing remain around the team, and his father's stories form part of the franchise's fabric. Brunson said leadership, for him, is an act of assembly rather than imitation. "There are a lot of different leaders in this world, and the way I've gone about it is taking bits and pieces of different things I've learned from leaders and trying to make it my own," he said. "The biggest lessons come from actually going through things. As a leader, it's just making sure we're all on the same page, we're all accountable for each other. We're going to go through this together -- the ups and the downs, like we have been."
For all the talk of legacy and lineage, Brunson kept returning to the same grounded place: a player trying to treat the biggest games of his life like any other. The surreal part, he suggested, can wait. "Once it's all said and done," he said, "there'll be time to think about it."
