After the New York Knicks advanced Monday to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, their star guard Jalen Brunson appeared calm amid the team’s celebration.
Brunson, after all, had been here before — when he was 2.
Brunson is 29 now. When he was a toddler, however, he was a regular in the Knicks’ locker room during the 1998-99 season as his father, Rick, was a backup guard on the last New York team to play for an NBA championship.
The Finals have come full circle.
“I’m not shocked by Jalen’s career, but I’m really happy for it,” Chris Dudley, a center on the 1999 team, told NBC News. Still, he allowed, “it was a little bit surreal to have Rick’s son be the star of the Knicks.”
The Knicks have reached the Finals by winning in historically lopsided fashion — 11 consecutive victories by an average margin of more than 25 points. When Brunson was awarded Most Valuable Player of the conference finals Monday, Knicks icon Patrick Ewing helped hand him the trophy.
“I’ve been knowing Jalen since he was a baby,” Ewing, the Hall of Fame center who was the Knicks’ heart and soul from 1985 to 2000, told NBC News this spring. “He would always be in the locker room, always bouncing the ball, following me all over.”
For most of the past quarter-century, the Knicks occupied an odd place within the NBA. Though they were the biggest team in the league’s biggest market, they were also irrelevant on the biggest stages. Earning an NBA title requires winning four playoff series; from 2000 to 2024, the Knicks won just three combined. In the same span, they produced 17 seasons with winning percentages under .500. Fans in Madison Square Garden at times implored the owner, James Dolan, to sell the team.
New York Knicks advance to NBA Finals
The franchise’s fortunes began to turn in 2022, when Brunson signed as a free agent from the Dallas Mavericks, where he had started his career as a role player. The Knicks offered him a bigger role and familiar faces. New York’s top basketball executive, Leon Rose, had been Rick Brunson’s agent during his playing career, and Rose’s son had begun as Jalen’s agent. (An NBA investigation later found the Knicks had tampered by discussing free agency before the proper time and docked the Knicks a second-round pick.)
During his introductory news conference, Brunson described remembering “seeing the guys in the locker room when I was a kid; it’s crazy sitting here right now. I don’t want to say it’s emotional, but it just brings back a lot of memories.”
He’s not the only one.
Ewing, who now works for the Knicks as a basketball ambassador, recalled organizing a trip to Jamaica with several teammates and their families during the late 1990s. In one photo from the vacation, he said, Brunson is perched on the back of Ewing’s oldest daughter.
One memory that remains vivid for Greg Brittenham, a Knicks assistant in 1999, was how comfortable Brunson appeared in Madison Square Garden even as a toddler.
“One time I walked up in the green room before the game, and he comes walking out with a whole big plastic cup of M&M’s, and I think that was his dinner that night,” Brittenham said. “He ate an entire cup.”
In New York, Brunson has transformed into the rarest class of NBA star — one capable of being the best player on a championship team, which was even more impressive considering his small stature. Last season, the Knicks made the conference finals for the first time since 2000. Amid their bid for a championship this spring, the Knicks have won 11 consecutive playoff games with Brunson as the team’s undisputed star and his dad as an assistant coach.
“To be able to coach his son, to get back to the Finals, is a great story for sure, and what it’s about is creating great memories,” said Charlie Ward, a guard on the 1999 Knicks.
It was common for the children of players and coaches to be around the team, at both games and practices. Dudley regularly brought his year-and-a-half-old son, Charles, to the locker room in 1999. Ewing’s son was a ball boy, as was a young man Ward mentored as part of a “big brother” program. Brittenham took his daughter and son to work and said his daughter, Rachel, would watch over Jalen before games.
“You could tell that Rick loved his son and took a lot of pride, and his face lit up when he had Jalen with him,” Dudley said.
As Jalen blossomed into an NBA star, home videos went viral of him when he was a preteen running up hills and training for long hours under the tough coaching of his father. His mother once told ESPN she worried it would turn Jalen off of basketball. Rick’s former teammates don’t find it surprising that he challenged Jalen to work hard. On a ’99 Knicks team that took pride in outworking opponents — it advanced to the Finals despite being its conference’s eighth seed — Rick was the model for that relentless attitude.
When Rick Brunson joined the Knicks in the fall of 1998, it was the second year of a peripatetic career in which he played for eight teams in nine seasons. He was on “the edge of the league,” Dudley said, needing to scrap just to hold on to a job. Brittenham worked with Brunson before games and said they made a pact to run the stairs of every arena in the league.
“He had that tenacity that he would instill in some of the superstar players we had,” Brittenham said. “I’ve had probably, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 players in 20 years, and he’d be my top 10 hardest-working players.”
All said they recognized in Jalen the same characteristics they remembered in Rick, “as far as work ethic and being a kind of being a pro’s pro, really understanding the work and seriousness of devoting to your craft,” as Dudley said.
Playing on a good Knicks team creates a buzz in New York that is palpable, former players said. Staying composed amid that atmosphere takes a unique level of focus.
“I talk to Patrick [Ewing] fairly frequently, and he tells me that Jalen’s got that same work ethic that his dad had,” Brittenham said.
Last year, when the Knicks made the conference finals for the first time since 2000, the Knicks invited several former players back to watch. Dudley took them up on the offer.
“I did speak to Jalen and Rick, and I just told Jalen he’s a lot better than his dad,” Dudley said.
The reunion was memorable for Dudley because the Knicks of a quarter-century ago were unusually tight-knit. The current Knicks roster was also built as a bet on chemistry. Brunson, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges all played in college together at Villanova, and Brunson and Hart host a podcast together. Rick Brunson was a guest on one episode, when it was revealed that he had given the Knicks jersey he wore during the ’99 Finals, complete with a patch, not to Jalen but to his sister, Erica. There was a message behind the choice.
“If you want one, get you an NBA Finals patch,” Rick said.
Ewing saw flashes of the younger Brunson’s potential when he coached Georgetown, his alma mater, and Brunson was a college star on national title-winning teams at a rival school. It made Ewing wish he’d begun recruiting Jalen as a kid.
“He kicked my butt at Georgetown when we played against him,” Ewing said. These days, he’s still impressed, saying, “The things that he’s able to do on the floor, I’m amazed by some of it.”
That’s not all, though.
“I definitely feel old,” Ewing said with a laugh.
