How Jalen Brunson has outperformed every expectation with Knicks: ‘Gold dust’

SAN ANTONIO — Jalen Brunson was about to play the first important game of his professional career, though this technically was not a professional game.

Shortly after the Dallas Mavericks selected him with the No. 33 pick in the 2018 NBA draft, the then-future star went to Las Vegas as part of the Team USA Select squad, essentially a group of practice players for the varsity team. Brunson wouldn’t compete in the upcoming World Cup or the Olympics, which were a few years out, but he could become a cog in helping better the country’s biggest stars.

Of course, Brunson wasn’t even one of the flashiest rookies to show up to camp.

He had fallen to the second round of the draft only weeks earlier. There were various lottery picks and projected stars on the select team. And then there was Brunson: a stocky, undersized point guard who stayed at Villanova for three years in part because no NBA franchise would scoop him up early in the first round.

But once inter-squad scrimmages began, so did a notable trend.

Pro scouts from NBA front offices sat in on the scrimmages when players on the select team go up against others from the select team. And one onlooker from Dallas, who wasn’t as familiar with Brunson’s game until he saw it up close, learned something about the team’s first-year guard.

Brunson’s team won the first game, and another, and then another, all with him as the floor general. At one point, he absorbed an accidental poke in the eye, which caused an abrasion red enough that scouts could spot it from the stands. When asked if he needed to come out, Brunson denied that anyone had touched him, despite the evidence scraped across his sclera.

He continued to play. More often than not — far more often than not, this scout from the Mavericks remembers — Brunson’s team won. Again and again.

The scout realized a trait of Brunson’s that day, one that then-Mavericks general manager Donnie Nelson already valued when he insisted on plucking Brunson with that 33rd overall pick. Brunson, he told colleagues, had “gold dust” on him. The descriptor made its way around the Mavs scouting department.

As one person with the organization defined the term, “He just f—ing wins.”

Brunson, as plenty around him put it, was covered in gold dust.

Especially these days, with a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals, the New York Knicks are witnessing that powder puff into the air with each step he takes.

This once cellar-dwelling franchise is one victory away from its first championship in 53 years. The Knicks have lost just one game since April 23. Brunson is far from the only reason for this heater, which featured a 13-game winning streak, the second-longest in NBA playoff history. Their plus-279 point differential is the best of any playoff run ever. Karl-Anthony Towns has formed into the best version of himself. New York’s wing combination of OG Anunoby, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges has stifled any opponents who hope to score from the perimeter. After a 33-point outburst that ended in a historic block and even more memorable game-winning tip-in, Anunoby may be the finals MVP frontrunner. Every night, a new role player becomes a main character.

But Brunson is the captain, the man at the top of the hierarchy, the one with that gold dust.

After Game 1 of the NBA Finals, during which New York trailed by 14 before roaring back to snatch yet another win, multiple Knicks commented on the team’s composure while down big. During an in-game speech, Towns reminded teammates of their comeback during Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals, when they overcame a 22-point fourth-quarter deficit to, somehow, beat the Cleveland Cavaliers by double digits.

It took Brunson going off for that to happen, as was true during the 29-point, Game 4 comeback, which Brunson and Anunoby led. As one Knicks player brushed off while discussing the mood of the team, even while it’s down big in an NBA finals game: “Jalen’s got us.”

The Knicks have trailed by double-digits during all three of their finals wins. Over the last two postseasons, they have overcome five 20-plus-point deficits. Composure is their brand.

Teams often reflect the personality of their leadership. The Knicks have taken on Brunson’s persona.

After a thrilling Game 2 win, in which New York avoided the kind of collapse it usually hits other teams with, Bridges stood on the court inside Frost Bank Arena with a microphone and camera in his face, and the adrenaline of the action still pumping through his body. Trying to explain what he just experienced, the veteran kept swaying from side to side, his voice choppy with shock and exhaustion. He was able to muster up the words.

“Just fight, integrity, poise and staying together. They’re a really good team, but we’re going to fight to the end.”

What’s the mindset going back to the Garden up 2-0?

“Zero-zero. Stay desperate … all times,” Bridges said.

Brunson uttered the same words on Friday as his team, with a 3-1 lead, is one win away from hoisting the Larry O’Brien trophy.

After Game 2, Bridges, while frantic and scatterbrained, was channeling his inner Brunson, on a night where the latter wasn’t his usual heroic self. Others pitched in to avoid a collapse, like Anunoby and Landry Shamet to leave San Antonio with two wins. They watched Brunson carry himself with steadiness time and time again in the fourth, so it was their turn.

Brunson doesn’t even want to be in the same room with the Larry O’Brien trophy. He’s tried to avoid any image of it as much as he can while walking around the bowels of the NBA Finals arenas. He doesn’t want to look at it, not until the job is finished.

To even talk about Brunson in this light would have seemed like a pipe dream nearly a decade ago. He was a second-round pick despite being a five-star recruit and two-time national champion. In college at Villanova, Brunson would practice and then later return to the gym at night with his father, Rick, who put him through extra workouts.

Even though Brunson was one of the country’s best recruits going into college, the Wildcats didn’t need him to contribute right away. Villanova was 33-3 the season before Brunson arrived on campus, and most of those key players would return the following year. They had a proven guard in Ryan Arcidiacono. Phil Booth had come off a successful freshman season. Hart was an established junior. Head coach Jay Wright never guaranteed Brunson that he would play immediately.

Brunson just forced Wright to play him.

“He worked his tail off to earn the starting spot,” Villanova assistant coach Ashley Howard said. “Jalen came in as the only McDonald’s All-American on our team. … We had a lot of guys in our program before that developed and didn’t come in with a lot of hype. They turned into big-time college players and pros at Villanova. Jalen was aware enough to know, ‘I’m going to come in here and outwork everybody so that no one could say that I’m this superstar, hot-shot freshman being given everything.’

“He showed he had a work ethic that was unmatched.”

Brunson was asked during these finals what he thought teams and scouts missed on him going through the draft process. With a smirk, he uttered one word: “Everything.”

“I knew through college, but I really knew when he signed (with the Knicks),” Bridges, who played with Brunson at Villanova, said when asked when he realized his longtime friend would become an NBA star. “I knew what he was going to do, especially in the league we play in. Him having the ball and being able to be ball dominant … his efficiency is out of the roof. I knew what he was going to be able to do with the ball in his hands here, more than what he was able to do in Dallas.”

A couple of weeks ago, with a finals appearance in sight, a reporter asked Brunson how long he had thought about the possibility of taking the Knicks, who had not made it to the last round of the playoffs since 1999, to the NBA Finals.

“Since I signed here,” he said.

His actions have followed suit.

In 2024, he signed an extension worth $156 million over four years, more money than many Wall Street CEOs make but also one with a financial sacrifice. The contract was the most Brunson was allowed to sign for on that day but was not the most money he could have earned had he prioritized his bank account alone.

If the highest dollar amount was all that occupied his mind, Brunson could have waited until the following summer, when he could have become a free agent. At that point, he would have become eligible for a five-year, $256 million deal, a difference of approximately $15 million in average annual value.

But Brunson took the four-year deal up front.

His reasoning was not all selfless. His father, Rick, an assistant coach with the Knicks, has always advised him about the importance of security. Rick played nine years in the NBA, almost all of them on non-guaranteed contracts. Years earlier, when Jalen was eligible for a four-year, $55 million extension with the Mavericks, Rick urged his son to take the deal, despite Brunson’s representatives at CAA advising him that $55 million was too cheap for a player of his caliber.

The situation resolved itself. The Mavericks never offered the extension in a concrete fashion, which led to them losing a future star, and the gold dust sprinkled onto him, in the summer of 2022.

Jalen agreed with his father’s analysis. Who can predict injuries or horrific luck? One-hundred-fifty-six million dollars may have represented a discount in the NBA’s economy, but in the real world, it was still $156 million.

So, Brunson took the deal — though security was only a speck of the logic.

On the other side was the team-building. This was not a case of a player taking less money just to line the pockets of an owner. It was an admission of how team-building works in the NBA now.

Brunson had studied the league’s collective-bargaining agreement, which is more restrictive of high-spending teams than ever. Teams that cross certain payroll thresholds don’t just have to pay a luxury tax; they also lose the ability to make certain types of trades and sign other kinds of free agents. Brunson didn’t want to just get paid or become a star in the NBA’s gaudiest media market. He wanted to win. Taking less money would allow the Knicks to acquire, and retain, talent.

Next season, an extension for Bridges kicks in. It won’t harm the Knicks because Brunson is making much less than market value. Mitchell Robinson’s contract expires this summer. The Knicks could hypothetically bring him back without as much of a financial penalty because of Brunson’s actions.

The Knicks are not just in a position to win this season. In a league where teams have short lifespans, where one disappointing year often means blowing a core to smithereens, New York has a chance to keep the band together, which it might choose to do, considering the chemistry that jumps through the screen any time one of its games is broadcasted over the airwaves and, more importantly, considering the organization is one win from a title.

It’s as if every Knicks player is covered in gold dust.