Basketball Hall of Famer Becky Hammon declared in December 2023 that Jalen Brunson was incapable of leading the New York Knicks, or any team, to the top tier of the Eastern Conference.
The WNBA legend asserted that, to predict the future, fans didn't need to look outside of the game's history. Brunson's height rendered him unable to live up to the unrealistic expectations of Knick fans.
With Brunson leading the Knicks to a 3-0 advantage over the Cleveland Cavaliers in this year's ECF, they seem sure to win the entire Eastern Conference: something the Las Vegas Aces' head coach had previously deemed impossible.
Knick fans misread Hammon's Brunson take: it's worse than they thought
The basis for Hammon's argument was reasonable. The coach presented the rest of the panel with the factual evidence that only a handful of NBA point guards had ever led their teams to such heights, with Isiah Thomas and Steph Curry at the top of that list.
Hammon did not err in her analysis of basketball's past, and how winning teams have typically been constructed.
She erred in determining that the past determines the rules of the future – and that a 27-year-old Brunson would never reach the level of Thomas, Curry, or any elite guard with a size disadvantage.
ESPN's Malika Andrews asked Hammon how "stuck" the Knicks were in the Eastern Conference, following up on a discussion that they were not in the top tier. The coach responded definitively that the Knicks are "not getting into that tier."
"They don't have enough personnel, they don't have the manpower that they need to hang with those guys....they don't have a dude. You gotta have a dude, you gotta have a 1A dude, and they're missing that at the end of the day, if we're just getting down to brass taxes," Hammon explained.
Ignoring the misused idiom, Kendrick Perkins countered that the Knicks had a "dude" in Brunson. Hammon immediately shut that down.
"Nah, he too small," she posited. "I have a philosophy...if your best player is small, you're not winning."
Hammon doubled down on Brunson "1A" take three months later
Three months later, Hammon switched up her take a bit before doubling down on it.
The goalposts moved slightly from escaping the second tier of the Eastern Conference to winning an NBA Championship. The coach explained that Brunson was the Knicks' 1A, but not a winning one.
"Yes, he is your 1A," Hammon clarified. "And alls I was saying is that I don't think you win a championship...so calm down, New York!"
The Knicks' superstar Captain has proven plenty of his greatest doubters wrong over the course of his career thus far. Basketball Hall of Famer Becky Hammon simply has to join the list, even if she claims that she never deemed Brunson incapable of leading New York to the East's top tier.
It's no insult to Hammon, or her objectively vast knowledge of the game of basketball, to say so.
It's simply a credit to Brunson. Even the most legendary voices still talking about the sport weren't able to see his dominance coming.
Brunson's career is defined by all the times he's proven experts wrong
Experts had Brunson ranked well outside of the top-10 prospects in high school when he committed to Villanova.
Collegiate experts deemed the guard incapable of leading a team to success at the collegiate level. Brunson did so, twice.
NBA experts had a chance to redeem themselves by drafting Brunson's winning DNA to their organization in 2018. No team did so in the first round.
The Dallas Mavericks, however, took him 33rd overall. That began his career as Luka Doncic's co-star, which culminated in a 41-point performance to keep their playoff hopes alive as the Slovenian superstar recovered from injury.
That, however, was not enough to convince the Mavericks that Brunson was good enough. They reportedly had trouble extending him because the four-year, $55 million extension he could have signed would have included a no-trade clause, something that worried the organization.
They wound up valuing Brunson much more highly when he became an unrestricted free agent, but it was too late. The point guard signed with the Knicks, who were unequivocally ridiculed by experts everywhere for putting their faith in a 6-foot-2 point guard.
Brunson became the first NBA player ever to sign a $100+ million deal with a team that didn't draft him, despite having zero All-Star appearances. The Knicks made him the 14th highest-paid point guard in the NBA. It was viewed as an embarrassing overpay.
The rest of the story is still writing itself, but it's hard to imagine these Cavaliers winning four games in a row. The moment that the final buzzer sounds, Brunson will have officially led a team to the very top of the Eastern Conference.
That's when the next challenge begins.
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