We look back on the way in which Jalen Brunson joined the New York Knicks and how he's won an NBA championship just a few years later.
Jalen Brunson took home Finals MVP honors as his New York Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in five games. New York captures its first NBA Championship since 1973 by stunning a young Spurs squad, which led by double digits in every game of the series.
Fans of the Dallas Mavericks will be quick to remember how the team acquired Luka Doncic and Brunson in the same NBA Draft in 2018, and now with both on new teams and continuing to thrive, the Mavs have no choice but to look back on a promising era with a shake of the head.
This, unfortunately, isn't the first time that an undersized guard has left the Mavs in free agency and gone on to find greater success outside of Dallas. Former majority owner Mark Cuban swore he wouldn't let the Steve Nash exit happen again, but just a handful of years later, that's how it has gone (to an even greater degree given how Nash never won a title).
Brunson scored 45 points in the championship-clinching win, a tightly-contested 94-90 win at Frost Bank Center in San Antonio.
Just before the Finals win, ESPN spoke with former Mavericks executive Donnie Nelson to detail the type of player Brunson was and ultimately how his tenure in Dallas came to an end.
"All I know is he had the same things that [Tim] Hardaway and Nash had - heart, brains, and balls," Nelson said. "Those are things that generally don't fit into an analytics model."
That can be seen in how Brunson has exploded into an All-NBA-caliber superstar now that he's "out" of Doncic's shadow. Although he has also needed time to grow into the player that he is today, Brunson likely needed more open space and time with the ball that he wouldn't have had while sharing a backcourt with Doncic.
But still, the skills were evident and do not make Brunson's ascension anything near a surprise.
"He was murdering people whenever we'd go one-on-one," a former Mavericks assistant told reporter Ramona Shelburne. "We had some great defenders on that team. And he's not exactly deceptive in what he's trying to do. You know what he's going to do. But no one could stop him."
That was clear in this year's postseason. Brunson averaged 28.4 points to go with a team-high 6.1 assists per game during the Knicks playoff run. During his final postseason run in Dallas - where the Mavs reached the Western Conference Finals in 2022 - Brunson had his first playoffs with 20 or more points per game (21.6).
Since then, he's increased his postseason average nearly every year. He's also helped the Knicks go further and further as a result.
"The biggest experience you get is actually going through things," Brunson said when discussing his Dallas departure.
As our Mike Fisher previously reported at the time of Brunson's free-agency move to the Big Apple, the Mavs made a series of mistakes in managing the former Villanova star's future.
1 - Rather than signing the second-round pick to an additional team option year, Dallas gave him a four-year deal straight up, which allowed Brunson to test unrestricted free agency as soon as it expired.
2 - Then, the Mavs were slow in their willingness to sign Brunson to what would've been a $56 million long-term extension at the time. Brunson was reportedly ready to sign, but the Mavs' apparent patience in getting a deal done caused the player's tensions to rise.
3 - By the time we got to unrestricted free agency, you can argue that Brunson had his mind made up that he'd pursue whichever team offered the figure he thought was best representative of his skillset. Still, the Mavs could have offered more than the $104 million over four years Brunson signed for in New York. They did not.
The rest is history. Brunson has become a bonafide star after once believing he'd spend the rest of his career in Dallas.
Adding onto Doncic's doomed-from-the-beginning trade to the Los Angeles Lakers - which subsequently launched the Mavs into a full-blown rebuild - Dallas is stuck wishing what could've been.
