On the therapy of Jalen Brunson doing Jalen Brunson things
The trade saga of a certain new Cleveland citizen is over… so shouldn’t we focus on the finer things, like Jalen Brunson’s extremely aesthetically-pleasing way of playing basketball?
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As fun as this Knicks offseason has been — sweatily orchestrating in our respective group chats the logistics of The Thing; and then sweatily watching the months-long middle-aged staring contest of the two men in unblinking control of The Thing — and now, finally, soaked through and thoroughly unsatisfied at pretty much every aspect of the process and the reporting and the aftermath of The Thing… can we, like, do something else for a bit?
Personally, I’ve gone the “10-hour binge of Jalen Brunson highlights without food or water” route.
Watching JB cook has undeniable therapeutic benefits. He is a maestro with the ball. It’s pleasant and hypnotic. He indiscriminately soufflés defenders with hesitations and feints, crosses and pivots, dangling looks in one direction as his body flirts with the opposite direction — and glorious combos of all of the above. A few hours into the highlights binge, the core of what makes Brunson so effective becomes increasingly clear: it’s the control and frequency with which he stops and starts.
It’s kind of a fun paradigm: the NBA wants the game to get faster and faster for the mass appeal of the product, and the best teams are prioritizing size and athleticism up and down the roster as a strategic advantage designed to both take away and leverage time and space. This positive feedback loop of what is watchable and what wins means the game is speeding up. And it’s this increase in speed that emphasizes the extent to which the best players are the best players precisely because of their ability to not be sped up. The age-old prerequisite for NBA success that comes with “the game slowing down” applies to guys top to bottom of the NBA food chain, but at the top, there are varied flavors to the mastery of time and space.
At the apex, demigods like LeBron and Luka play as if they could write poems between dissecting defensive rotations. These guys are the best because they are singularly spectacular processors. Then you have guys like Steph and Giannis, who do similar things in different ways, by breaking the rules of time and space with glitch-like strokes and strides, nullifying whole chunks of basketball norms that apply to everyone except them.
Brunson’s flavor of mastery as a jitterbug manipulator isn’t in the same category of impact as the guys in the paragraph above. Obviously. It’s nowhere close. I’m not that high on highlights. But there is a relationship between the way both play with and weaponize time and space. The relationship between the Demigod flavor and JB’s flavor is something like that between war and a single punch, love and a single kiss, a full blown spiritual epiphany and the fuzzy buzz of 10 hours of YouTube.
Essentially: the best part of Brunson’s game is a microcosm of the best part of the game’s best players.
And that, my friends — all four of you who are still reading — is fun to watch.
It’s fun to watch him stop and start his way to a bucket on Marcus Smart. With five moves — the smitty, stop-on-a-dime behind-the-back, head fake, in-and-out, cross — in five seconds.
It’s fun to watch him stop and start his way to a bucket on Mikal Bridges. He only needed a single smitty’s worth of separation on this one before finishing over an extremely long arm with a deadly lefty scoop.
It’s fun to watch him stop and start his way to a bucket on Jaren Jackson Jr. Hitting him with the cross, stop, and step-back as JJJ tried to remember what he did for a living.
It’s fun to watch him stop and start his way to a bucket on Jrue Holiday. Subtly turning Jrue at half court with an in-and-out, before riding that advantage into the paint — of course eying up the smitty the whole way, which of course Jrue doesn’t give him a window for — before spinning into and knocking down a tough turnaround.
It’s fun to watch him stop and start his way to a bucket on Rudy Gobert. We’ve obviously all seen this one before, but like a fine French wine, it seems to get better with age, with poor Rudy’s limbs resembling a sack of exploding baguettes, arms and legs launched in all directions like a dystopian rendition of Saturday Night Fever.
Not only is it fun to watch JB cook four-fifths of last season’s All-Defensive First Team, it’s also useful, as a lesson for those of us licking our wounds and dangerously up in our post-Thing feelings after a summer spent poking Twitter with a stick.
Stop subjecting yourself to the cartoon known as Stephen A. Smith. Start looking forward to the best point guard the Knicks have had in four million years.
Stop playing detective with the leaks and counter-leaks. Start looking forward to the fit of Quintin Grimes and RJ Barrett as young, improving, two-way wings to flank and perfectly complement the best point guard the Knicks have had in four million years.
Stop reminiscing about picks made and picks not made, pick protections and pick swaps. Start thinking about how deep and deeply likable this roster is, led by, but by no means limited to, the best point guard the Knicks have had in four million years.
It can be a powerful thing, a brief stoppage. A second to gather yourself and survey your surroundings. A moment to locate and redirect some positive momentum. A quick pause to shake yourself free of the absurdity of straight-faced RJ Barrett and Collin Sexton comparisons.
Forget the Donovan Mitchell thing. Hit it with a psychological smitty and leave it in the dust. Follow the example of a guy who actually plays for the Knicks, before we gamely close our eyes and sprint headfirst and screaming into the next cycle of pointless mass perspiration.
I can hear the drumroll of the first Shai Gilgeous-Alexander trade constructions already, the brain-mashing beat which will be accompanied by the tune of a media-manufactured desperation that the Knicks Must Do Something Soon. For some, this will be lazily based on the click-worthy consensus that because the trade the Cavs made for Mitchell was a good one, then by default the Knicks not making the trade is a failure. Which of course will be a totally ridiculous narrative made true only to the extent that it is repeated loudly and often.
How about we focus on the guys we’ve got rather than the guys we could get? How about we focus on the fact that Jalen was the one pouring enough points and gasoline on the Utah Jazz franchise back in the spring to kick this whole thing off, fueling the flames that started Danny Ainge’s fever dream of a fire sale? Come to think of it, while we’re looking back on the skip-happy memory of the last playoff series Danny and his mountain of picks will be involved in for quite some time, remind me: who was the best player in that series again?
Jalen Brunson for Knicks fans is therapy for a trauma that runs DNA-deep. It would take 10 long, miserable, hours to recite the names of former point guards who couldn’t do to a chair in an empty gym what he can do to the best defenders on the planet. He not only fixes a position of perpetual need, and is the perfect fit for an imperfect coach, but he specializes in the type of concrete sorcery that is food and water to an MSG faithful long starved of consistent oohs and ahs. We’ve gone from the crumbs of poor Alec Burks’ doomed versatility to a four course meal served up by one of the shiftiest dudes on the planet.
So, yeh, let’s stop and do something else. Personally, I’m starting by getting very excited about something very exciting: a season watching Jalen Brunson doing Jalen Brunson things.
