Best of the Knicks on WFAN: Jalen Brunson's legend grows

**Chris McMonigle** (0:00)
Boomer mentioned Jalen Brunson, and I'll lay it out this way.
Jalen Brunson right now is a just man amongst boys in this town because of what he led the Knicks to, and that's the first championship in 53 years. Since he has been here, he has been nothing short of fantastic. He's been a selfless player at times. He's been, when he's had to, a selfish player because of circumstances on the court where he's got to put the team on his back, but he's been great in every which way, and he's also a hell of a nice guy and very likable. Then comes word yesterday that, and I think we, at the end of the basketball season, everybody's banged up, but to find out that he played through an injury through the postseason and the final specifically, that was so painful and messed up that he had surgery yesterday to repair it. I mean, what else can this guy do for an encore? Really, that's unbelievable.

**Craig Carton** (0:54)
Well, I mean, go win another one if you can, and that would put him in ledger. He's already in ledger status.

**Chris McMonigle** (1:00)
He's a ledger now, yeah.

**Craig Carton** (1:02)
And a lot of it, despite his size and despite some of the detractors that were out there, but the moment he got here, he re-energized his basketball team, took them to the playoffs, and then finally they were able not to stay healthy enough to make it all the way through and win the finals after 53 years, which is really an amazing accomplishment on behalf of the entire team, Mike Brown, Jim Dolan, and of course, Leon Rose, who is the architect of all of this. Now, he's going to have to navigate through max extensions and all this other crap that all these other teams are dealing with now.
I was in there talking to Rami and Joey, big basketball fans that they are, and we were talking about how the salary gap is now flat this year because of the success of the Knicks in the playoffs. You're saying, what do you mean? Well, because they only played 19 games. They went 16 and 3, as opposed of a possible 28 games. When you think about 4 or 7 game series, and when you have that kind of success, you're obviously losing for the networks that pay all this money, you're losing content, you're losing live content. So their success probably hurt the overall salary cap somewhat coming into this year, and you got to be really, really careful about who you're paying, how much you're paying them, and we saw what Donovan Mitchell got yesterday, and I'm just, like, eventually, Carl Anthony Towns is going to get his extension.
Josh Hart probably wants an extension right now, we're just probably not hearing about it, because most players want security, they want length, and I can see Josh Hart is making, I think, about 20 million this year, and maybe 20 million under a player option next year, so essentially he has two years of guaranteed money. He would like a raise, and he would like to extend it out to four years, at least, or maybe five years, but maybe four.
And then Jalen Brunson is right around the corner, and eventually he's going to get his money. And should. Yeah, because he took less to come here in the first place, and then he was the first building block that got this thing off and running, with Leon Rose making all these different decisions and all these different transactions. So the fact that he's coming off of an injury, a surgery, we didn't hear anything about it, we didn't know anything about it, we didn't see his wrist wrapped up during games or any of that stuff, just goes to show you just how truly great a player he has turned himself into. And then I was talking, yes, I was told I played golf over at Edgewood, in Rivervale over there in New Jersey, and T-Bone was my caddy. Man, chatterbox the whole time, right? So he has obviously caddyed for a number of ex-basketball players and athletes and hockey players. And one of those guys was Ron Harper, Dylan's dad. So we were talking about Dylan and I'm like, I didn't realize how I, I knew he was good at Rutgers. I never really knew how good he was. You kept coming in here saying that this kid is unbelievable. And then watching him in the series against the Knicks, I was like, wow, this kid is the next emerging superstar that you can see physically has all the attributes of being an individually great player. There's only one problem with all these individually great players that come out of our system here in the States.