Becky Hammon said Brunson wasn’t a ‘1A’ dude, and she wasn’t alone in her skepticism
The New York Knicks have won their first championship since 1973 and just the third in franchise history with a 94-90 win over the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday night in Game 5 of the NBA Finals.
It caps one of the most impressive postseason runs in history and seemingly puts to bed the notion that small point guards — at least ones not named Stephen Curry — cannot lead teams to a title in the modern NBA. Jalen Brunson was unanimously named Finals MVP after the Knicks clinched the title.
This dialogue heated up in late May when former Spurs assistant coach and current coach of the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces Becky Hammon doubled down on a comment she made back in 2023. “If your best player is small, you’re not winning [an NBA championship],” Hammon said three years ago.
“John Stockton. Allen Iverson. Steve Nash. You can go down the list,” Hammon said on ESPN, rattling off names of great small point guards who never won a title (with Curry, who she said is in a “different class” as the greatest shooter in history, being the exception). …”At the end of the day, [the Knicks] don’t have a dude. You got to have a dude [to win an NBA championship]. You got to have a 1A dude. And they’re missing that.”
Hammon was given the chance to recant her Brunson skepticism in the aftermath of New York’s sweep of the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals. At that point, they had won 11 straight playoff games by a historic point differential, and Brunson was leading the charge.
“I stand by it,” Hammon said. “I said what I said [two years ago]. If he proves me wrong, he proves me wrong.”
So here’s the thing: Brunson did prove Hammon wrong. And Draymond Green, who also stated that the Knicks lacked a “1A” player. He proved everyone wrong. Anyone who tells you they saw Brunson becoming this kind of player when he signed with the Knicks is a liar.
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It was the summer of 2022 when Brunson came over from the Mavericks on a four-year, $104 million deal. At the time, he was regarded as a consolation prize, if not an outright disappointment, after the franchise had struck out on a Donovan Mitchell trade as the latest in a long line of big-name whiffs.
No LeBron James in 2010. The Carmelo Anthony and Amar’e Stoudemire connection never really materialized. No Kevin Durant or Kyrie Irving in 2019. Just about every analyst, from garage bloggers to the highest-platform shock jocks, all but laughed at the Knicks for believing Brunson could be that guy. Even the great Tim Legler is on record saying he has never, as an evaluator, been more wrong about a player’s ceiling than Brunson.
The point here is not to spotlight Legler, one of the smartest analysts out there, or Hammon or Green or anyone else for being wrong. Again, everyone was wrong. Coming out of Villanova, where Brunson won a pair of national titles, he was considered too small. Too slow. Not athletic enough. A defensive liability. He didn’t get drafted until No. 33 overall, which makes him the second-lowest draft pick to ever win Finals MVP (trailing only Nikola Jokic at No. 41 overall).
When people call these kinds of underdog stories the stuff movies are made of, it’s because it’s true. There are very few real-life cases of David rising to the top of a game dominated by Goliaths. Only four players in history listed at 6-foot-2 or shorter have won a Finals MVP: Curry, Isiah Thomas, Tony Parker and now Brunson.
Which is to say, Hammon wasn’t wrong in denouncing little guys as capable championship catalysts as a general rule. She — and many others — was just wrong in failing to identify Brunson as one of the exceptions.
Even during these Finals, despite the Knicks jumping out to a 2-0 lead with Brunson playing the part of fourth-quarter hero in both, the doubters who so desperately wanted to be right pointed to his inefficiency. They said Karl-Anthony Towns was actually the most important player for the Knicks. Or maybe OG Anunoby. After New York lost Game 3, all the talk about Brunson’s high dribble and possession time started bubbling up again.
When the Knicks went down 29 in Game 4, and it looked like San Antonio was about to take control of the series, you could feel the pressure cooker heating up. But some athletes are built for the pressure. The Michael Jordans. Derek Jeters. Tom Bradys. Yes, players like this are extraordinarily talented, as is Brunson, whose immense skill often goes overlooked in the interest of upselling the more romantic story of his heart, but at the end of the day, there aren’t many even great athletes who can carry the kind of burden that is the hope of New York basketball.
In the tighest moments, Brunson plays his lightest. Like he’s floating around on some playground as the sun is going down, all the other kids having gone home, putting himself in through the game-on-the-line shots only he believed he would one day be taking.
In Game 1, Brunson scored 13 of his 30 points on 5-for-9 shooting in the fourth quarter. In Game 2, he knocked down the tying shot with under 40 seconds to play and the winning free-throw. In Game 4, he made six of eight shots from the 8:23 mark of the third quarter to the 1:22 mark of the fourth. Over that span, New York turned a 23-point deficit into a one-point lead as they went on to finish the greatest comeback in Finals history.
This brought the series to Game 5 on Saturday, when Brunson rolled the credits on one of the best stories the NBA has ever seen with a 45-point masterpiece to not just stamp the highest Finals scoring average by a point guard in history (32.6 PPG), but more importantly to end more than a half-century of Knicks-fan suffering. That was a special kind of suffering because New York is a special basketball place. Unlike any other in the world if non-New Yorkers can be allow themselves to be honest. Brunson would be a hero in any city for what he just pulled off. But in New York? He’s a legend. Forever.
“He is ‘him,” Knicks coach Mike Brown said of Brunson. “I’ve been saying it all along. He is an MVP candidate. Not the fifth, sixth, seventh guy. He is a top one, two, at worst three, and he displayed it tonight. His toughness, not just physically but mentally, is unbelievable. And people take that for granted because they think he’s too slow, too small, too this, too that. But he’s one of the toughest [mother f—ers] I’ve ever been around.”
