New York won the day that Leon Rose took over the Knicks. I don’t mean that in, like, a global sense; I mean it literally. On March 2, 2020, the orange-and-blue scored a 125-123 upset win over the Houston Rockets:
To watch those highlights is to step into an extremely specific time machine. (And, considering it’d drop you off about a week before the coronavirus became extremely real in the NBA and the U.S. at large, maybe one better avoided.) The only member of the visiting team still wearing Rockets red is Jeff Green, and he was on two different teams before returning to Houston last season. Maurice Harkless, Wayne Ellington, Frank Ntilikina and Elfrid Payton all played at least 19 minutes for New York; they’re all out of the league now. (Not starting center Taj Gibson, though! He’s still around.) The Knicks’ leading scorer in that win was RJ Barrett — the No. 3 pick in the 2019 NBA Draft, New York’s consolation prize for missing out on Zion Williamson and Ja Morant, and, at the time, seemingly its best shot at finding a star.
The cupboard wasn’t bare when Rose took the reins: Barrett had shown some two-way promise, center Mitchell Robinson was finishing his second season in New York, and power forward Julius Randle was wrapping up his first. But he didn’t have a ton to work with as he inherited a team with the NBA’s fifth-worst record, circling the drain of its seventh straight sub-.500 season, and on its sixth head coach in that dismal span.
Year after year, the hoped-for heroes — those who made it to Madison Square Garden, like Amar’e Stoudemire, Carmelo Anthony and Phil Jackson, and those who never did, like LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving — had never actually saved the day in one fell swoop. Fast-forward four summers, though, and the Knicks are coming off their first 50-win season in a decade, with a playoff series victory in two straight postseasons — the first time they’ve done that since the springs of 1999 and 2000. They kept one of the most coveted wings on the free-agent market in OG Anunoby and added another in Mikal Bridges, building what profiles as one of the NBA’s deepest, most talented eight-man rotations.
And on Friday, Rose and Co. agreed to terms with All-NBA point guard Jalen Brunson on a four-year, $156.5 million extension that secures the services of New York’s superstar point guard through at least the end of the 2027-28 season — arguably the biggest coup of this NBA offseason, and the capstone on a years-long, brick-by-brick, transaction-by-tedious-transaction process by which New York has built a pathway to sustainable success.
You’ve probably heard by now that the extension Brunson accepted amounts to about $113 million less than the maximum that he could have commanded from the Knicks next summer, had he played out this season and declined his player option for 2025-26 to enter unrestricted free agency before re-upping. You might’ve also heard that it’s really more like $37 million less, if you account for the possibility of Brunson opting out in 2028-29, after the influx of revenue from the NBA’s forthcoming $76 billion broadcast rights deal has begun to flow into the league’s financial structure.
By ’28-29, Brunson will have accrued 10 years of NBA service time, making him eligible to sign a new contract beginning at 35% of the salary cap. A full-freight five-year deal at that level would pay a projected $418 million. That accounting assumes a lot, of course — most notably that Brunson will still be producing at a level commensurate with a full-boat max at age 32, and that the Knicks would still be willing to pay him at that rate through age 37.
Not that it would be surprising for Brunson to have more faith and trust in New York’s braintrust and surroundings than some other stars would have in theirs, though. After all, it does consist of a team president in Rose who is both his godfather and the father of his agent, Sam Rose; a head coach in Tom Thibodeau who has known him since infancy and who employs as an assistant his father, Rick Brunson; and now, three of his best friends in former Villanova teammates Bridges, Josh Hart and Donte DiVincenzo.
“Jalen has often called the Knicks his family, and we are beyond proud to have him wear and represent our orange and blue for years to come,” Rose said in a team statement announcing Brunson’s extension. “Jalen has embraced every challenge since he’s come to New York and has been committed since day one to the vision and plan we set forth for the future of this team.”
That plan began in 2020, when Rose began his tenure by hiring Thibodeau to the head-coaching job for which he was born, and then used one of his first two draft picks as an executive on Immanuel Quickley, a spark-plug guard who’d bloom into a Sixth Man of the Year finalist — and, eventually, a co-headliner with Barrett in the deal that would bring Anunoby to Manhattan. Three months later, the Knicks sent Dennis Smith Jr. and a pair of future second-rounders to Detroit for longtime Thibs lieutenant Derrick Rose — an injection of instant offense off the bench who helped transform the Knicks into a playoff team, waking up the echoes at the World’s Most Famous Arena and introducing a new generation of basketball watchers (and, hell, basketball players) to what it looks like when MSG…
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