Rick Brunson got nine seconds in the Knicks’ last NBA Finals. Jalen gets a chance to finish the story 22%
By C.J. Holmes0%
6/3/2026, 11:00:11 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Halo Effect, Confirmation Bias, and Availability Heuristic, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 13% saturation with 138 hits. Analysis detected 1,180 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,062 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 35.6% and a BS Rank of 22% (16,624 of 21,198 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 78.40% of the article peer group.
Rick Brunson’s role in the Knicks’ last NBA Finals appearance lasted nine seconds.
Nine seconds in Game 3 in 1999, all of them in the Knicks’ only win of a series the San Antonio Spurs ended in five.
Rick was a reserve guard near the edge of Jeff Van Gundy’s bench, close enough to feel the chase, not close enough to decide how it ended.
Jalen Brunson was 2 years old.
Twenty-seven years later, Rick is back on the Knicks’ bench.
Jalen is no longer the toddler growing up around NBA locker rooms, practices and games.
He’s the Eastern Conference Finals MVP, the franchise guard, the player most responsible for bringing the Knicks back to a stage his father reached but never conquered.
Rick’s Finals story with the Knicks was brief and unfinished.
Jalen now gets the role his father never had, the chance to lead the Knicks to the finish.
The full-circle part is almost too perfect, except nothing about the Brunsons has been handed down easily.
Rick didn’t give Jalen an NBA life.
He showed him how fragile one could be.
Mike Breen told the story during a broadcast.
Rick always wanted to play for the Philadelphia 76ers.
They were the first team to cut him, then, years later, the last.
He played well in a Knicks-Sixers preseason game at Madison Square Garden and thought he might finally make the team.
Instead, he was told afterward he had been released.
His career was over.
Jalen was 10 years old and with him.
Father and son drove from New York to Philadelphia in tears.
“And when his career was over,” Breen said, “he started working with his son.”
Jalen didn’t just grow up near the NBA.
He grew up close enough to see it break his father’s heart.
Rick took the pain and turned it into instruction.
He’d been an undrafted guard who fought for every roster spot, played for eight teams and built a basketball life on persistence.
Jalen became the student.
The work wasn’t soft, and Rick never pretended otherwise.
Rick told SNY’s Ian Begley he knew early his son treated basketball differently.
“Most kids play, go home and enjoy the rest of the day,” Rick told Begley.
“He cared about winning and losing.
Losing bothered him.
He wanted to be perfect, he wanted to play well, he wanted to win.”
It explains plenty about the player the Knicks trust in the clutch.
Brunson plays with polish, but his rise hasn’t carried the ease of inevitability.
He’s been doubted for his size, his ceiling, his draft slot and his ability to be the best player on a team with this much riding on every trip down the floor.
Rick saw the obsession before the rest of the league did.
Then he kept pressing on it.
“I would always tell him, ‘This is what a college coach is going to do — the difference is I love you, he doesn’t,’” Rick told Begley.
That’s not the language of a father content to watch from a distance, but of a former player who knew what the sport could demand, and what it could take.
Rick has described his role in Jalen’s basketball life in even simpler terms.
During a 2024 appearance on “The Roommates Show” podcast with his son, Rick said of Jalen’s negotiations with the Dallas Mavericks, “My job is to protect you.”
Protection hasn’t meant softness with Rick.
Sometimes it meant guarding Jalen through the business of the league.
Sometimes it meant refusing to let him get comfortable.
Sometimes it meant challenging him in full view of an arena.
That happened back in April during the Knicks’ first-round series against the Atlanta Hawks, when Rick barked toward Jalen on the sideline during Game 4.
Nobody outside the Knicks’ circle knows everything said.
The Knicks won that night and haven’t lost since.
Jalen followed with 39 points and eight assists, then 17 and eight, then 35 more.
The exchange wasn’t a magic trick.
It was another window into a relationship built on pressure, response and work.
Knicks head coach Mike Brown didn’t sound bothered by it.
He sounded amused.
“They have a unique relationship, and I enjoy every aspect of it,” Brown said.
Brown has seen both sides.
He called Jalen “as coachable as they come,” then laughed at the idea of dealing with the elder Brunson as a player.
“If I had to coach his father, it might be different,” Brown said.
That’s part of what makes this about more than a father watching his son become a star.
Rick isn’t a ceremonial figure on the Knicks’ bench.
He handles the minutes sheet and is responsible for substitutions, putting him inside the machinery of a Finals team led by his son.
Rick came back to the Knicks as an assistant in June 2022, about a month before Jalen signed in free agency.
His presence became part of the backdrop to Jalen’s arrival, not the whole explanation for it.
He had his own ties to the organization as a former Knicks guard and longtime Tom Thibodeau assistant.
Jalen still had to come to New York, take the ball, change the franchise and grow into the player the Knicks are built around.
Now their roles sit beside each other every night.
The father watches the clock and the rotation.
The son controls the game.
One was a reserve on the Knicks’ last Finals team.
The other carries the next one.
One played nine seconds in the franchise’s lone win of the 1999 Finals.
The other has a chance to give the Knicks the ending Rick’s team never reached.
There are more famous father-son NBA bloodlines.
Dell and Steph Curry.
Mychal and Klay Thompson.
The Brunsons’ version belongs to New York in a more specific way.
Rick fought to stay in the league, Jalen watched what it cost, and now both are part of the Knicks’ first Finals trip since Rick wore the uniform.
It all sounds too perfect until the Brunsons enter it.
Then it becomes something tougher.
Not inheritance.
Not a fairy tale.
Work passed down through frustration, protection, correction and stubborn belief.
Rick can be proud later.
For now, he still has a job to do.
His son does, too.
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