Jalen Brunson gifts reminder of elite ability on Christmas Day
NEW YORK — Adrian Griffin remembers. He doesn’t need to close his eyes. The Milwaukee Bucks head coach can still picture a teenage Jalen Brunson sweating at the Chicago Bulls’ practice facility when Griffin and Rick Brunson, Jalen’s father and a current Knicks assistant, were both members of Tom Thibodeau’s staff beginning in 2010.
“And he coached Jalen hard,” Griffin said. “I used to watch [Rick] all the time with Jalen, and Jalen was getting better. I looked at my kids and said, ‘I’m slacking. We gotta get in the gym.’”
Griffin’s recall practically described old footage that surfaced online in recent days, with the younger Brunson probably not much older than the prospect Griffin spotted on the Bulls’ court, except this clip features father drilling son on an outdoor basket. Brunson’s feet are dragging across the blacktop, clearly fatigued from repetition after repetition. But you can hear his mentor barking for Brunson to run back and corral the ball after each shot. Dad threatens to chuck the rock all the way to the damn fence lining the opposite baseline, harping for his pupil to jog through the dribbles and his crossovers into the midrange pull-up he’s now perfected with New York a decade later.
“It’s a testament to all the hard work they put in together,” Griffin said.
“Just seeing Jalen in the gym around the pros his whole life,” Thibodeau said, “you could just see as a 6-year-old his love for the game.”
Brunson channeled that fire into another brilliant performance against Milwuakee on Monday, opening the NBA’s Christmas Day slate with 38 points and six assists in a 129-122 win over Griffin’s visiting Bucks — the Knicks’ first win in four tries against Giannis Antetokounmpo this season. Brunson’s shifty scoring totaled the third-most Christmas points in Knicks history for a franchise that has played the most contests on the holiday than any other in the league. When he stepped to the foul line with 4:08 remaining, MVP chants emanated from the sellout crowd.
Brunson hasn’t garnered that level of support outside of Midtown Manhattan. On ESPN.com’s first straw poll tracking early MVP impressions among the voting media, Brunson did not appear in the top 12. Becky Hammon, the head coach of the Las Vegas Aces, made waves when she claimed Brunson, at 6-foot-1, 190 pounds, is too small to be the true top option of a championship contender. And yet he’s 16th in the NBA in scoring at 25.6 per game, prone to flirt with 40 — and even drop 50 — on any given night, much in part to a career-high clip of 46.2% shooting beyond the arc, good for seventh in the NBA.
All of Brunson’s offbeat footwork was on full display against Milwaukee. His stutter steps and always-active pivot force longer and stronger defenders off balance, even with the size and athletic disadvantages Hammon critiqued. He will fool an opponent by spinning into a fadeaway, then school another, like Bucks rookie wing Andre Jackson, by faking that fade and stepping under the contest for an easy lay-in.
“He’s tough because he has all the nuances,” Griffin said. “He knows how to draw fouls. He can shoot the 3 off the dribble. He has a pull-up off the bounce, and then he can finish at the rim. He’s a very high IQ player.”
Griffin and the elder Brunson were also teammates before they overlapped in Chicago, playing for the 1997-98 Connecticut Pride of the CBA. “We’re really like brothers,” Griffin said. Chasing their hoop dreams required 15-hour bus rides across the country. “You got $20 per diem,” Griffin said. “Five-dollar breakfast. Five-dollar lunch. And then $10 for dinner, we’d splurge at, like, Bob Evans’ all you can eat.”
So when they reconnected under Thibodeau with the Bulls, both men didn’t squint at the opportunity to push their children down a straighter path toward the league. Griffin’s son, A.J., became the No. 16 pick in the 2022 NBA Draft for the Atlanta Hawks.
“Being able to see Coach Griff and his son on the other end, while I’m shooting with my dad on the other end, and then seeing where his son is, and where he’s at, it’s a pretty special feeling,” Jalen Brunson said.
He now has the Knicks at 17-12 and a half-game out of the No. 4 seed that New York earned in Thibodeau’s first campaign on the sideline in 2020-21. Behind Brunson, Thibodeau is juggling a problem most coaches would welcome: dividing minutes between last season’s Sixth Man of the Year finalist, Immanuel Quickley, the scrappy Josh Hart, free-agent acquisition Donte DiVincenzo and a Thibodeau favorite in Quentin Grimes. They will have to continue neutralizing the absence of starting center Mitchell Robinson, as veteran big man Taj Gibson, another Thibodeau mainstay, held his own Monday against Antetokounmpo and Brook Lopez.
No matter what personnel or what transactions color those edges, Brunson continues to showcase just how high he can carry this New York roster. No matter how short his shoulders stand above the ground.
