The NBA is always getting taller, longer, springier, stronger. The league’s future might lie in lithe titans like Victor Wembanyama and Evan Mobley. We now have the technology to imbue stick figures with strength, mobility, and guard skills. You’d be hard-pressed to identify an elite prospect under 6-foot-4. In such a world, the best player on the New York Knicks seems almost like an act of defiance. Small, dense, and inexorable, Jalen Brunson is a rock tumbling down a hill. He’ll kick up off a tree root, squash a small weed, and get jostled by the changing curve of the slope. But he’ll always create a path through any resistance.
I’m convinced that Brunson’s official 6-foot-2 listing is one of the league’s many fake measurements. He might land two inches shy of that, and has approximately the bodily proportions of a thumb. He doesn’t get too high off the ground, and he doesn’t run all that fast. What he does is weaponize what must be the lowest center of mass of any NBA star. He hunches over the ball, protecting it with the cave of his body, backing his way into the post. When he turns to face up, he’ll use his shoulders to batter and dislodge his bigger opponents; where necessary, he will even use a noggin so big that his teammates wear colossal hats to mock it.
Brunson can blow by a defender on occasion, but more often he will bounce off them and right into a new angle of attack, moving into the small corridor of space he has just created. Steadily bumping, plodding, jump-stopping, pivoting, all of it at his own deliberate pace, until he finds just enough clean air to get off a look with his lovely lefty touch. There’s no better showcase for all that than his 42-point, 10-assist performance in the Knicks’ 124-118 home win over the Rockets on Monday.
The Houston Rockets boast some of the most physical and malicious perimeter defense in the league. If ever there were a squad built to keep up with those battering-ram antics, it’s these guys. Yet Brunson could take burly wings like Tari Eason and Dillon Brooks out of the play, as if he were operating at a different scale of magnification and they were too slow-footed or -witted to keep up. The Rockets in general got too handsy with the Knicks star and sent an inveterate foul-baiter to the line all night, where he sank 13-of-14, twice his season average for attempts.
Rockets wing Amen Thompson is 6-foot-7, 209 pounds, and is one of the most explosive athletes in the NBA. Over the coming decade, he could be one of the league’s most dogged defenders at the point of attack. But even he can still be sent stumbling when a determined little guy hurls himself shoulder-first into his belly button. Brunson’s modus operandi actually matches up pretty well against Thompson, who is such a run-and-jump anomaly that he can instantly close gaps when he is beaten or helping on the play. Instead of trying to beat him at all, it can be wiser to keep him close, nudge him off balance and then act decisively before he can regain his bearings.
A gameful of incessant drives will open up other lines of attack, too. With the Knicks up by one point and one minute on the clock, a calm Brunson stepped up to Thompson, who was primed to defend the drive once again, and sank his only successful pull-up three of the night. Brunson put up 17 total points in the fourth, making all of his last five shots to put the game away.
The stylistic transition from last season’s rock-fight Knicks to this season’s softer, slicker, less consistent squad hasn’t always been enjoyable. The Karl-Anthony Towns experience is exactly as thrilling and maddening as anticipated. But I’d underestimated just how good Brunson would look when rolling into the huge expanse in the middle of the floor, opened up by a sweet-shooting center. He’s 28 years old and still getting better every year, leading a team increasingly built in his image to third place in the East. While it’d be difficult to argue that Brunson’s development would have followed the same steep curve on a different team, it’s fun to remember that in 2022, the Dallas Mavericks’ front office let this guy walk for nothing. Surely they couldn’t top that mistake.
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