Jalen Brunson plays like a rolling cliff

The NBA always gets taller, longer, jumpers, stronger. The future of the league may be in Lithe titans such as Victor Wembanyama and Evan Mobley. We now have the technology to put stick -figures with strength, mobility and protective skills. You would be hard pressed to identify an elite view below 6-foot-4. In such a world, the best player on New York Knicks seems almost like an act of faith. Small, dense and inexcusable Jalen Brunson is a rock that tumbles down a hill. He wants to kick up a tree red, squash a small weed and be spread by the changing curve of the slope. But he will always create a path through any resistance.

I am convinced that Brunson’s official 6-foot-2 list is one of the league’s many fake measurements. He may land two centimeters shyly for it and has about the bodily shares of a thumb. He doesn’t get too high from the ground and he doesn’t run so fast. What he does is weapon what is supposed to be The lowest exhibition center for any NBA star. He bends over the ball and protects it with the hole hole and backs into the post. When he turns to, he uses his shoulders to beat and remove his larger opponents; How necessary he will even use a noggin so great that his teammates Carry colossal hats to spot it.

Brunson can blow by a defender occasionally, but more often he will jump off them and straight into a new angle of attack and move into the small corridor of the room he has just created. Support offensive, plodding, jump-stop, turning, all at his own conscious pace, until he finds just enough pure air to get rid of his lovely left side. There is no better showcase for all that than his 42-point, 10-assisted performance in Knicks’ 124-118 home winds over Rockets Monday.

Houston Rockets boasts some of the most physical and malicious circumference defense in the league. If there was ever a team that was built to keep up with these battery-ram-antics, it’s these guys. Still, Brunson could take Burly Wings like Tari Eason and Dillon Brooks out of the play, as if he was operating in another magnifying scale, and they were too slow foot or to follow. Rockets generally became Handsy with the Knicks star and sent an invited violation to the line all night, sank 13-of-14, twice his season average for attempts.

Rockets Wing Amen Thompson is 6-Foot-7, 209 Pounds, And is one of the most explosive athletes in the NBA. Over the coming decade, he could be one of the league’s most dogged defenders at the point of attack. But even he can still be sent tripping when a purposeful little guy throws himself the shoulder into his stomach button. Brunson’s Modus Operandi actually matches pretty well against Thompson, which is such a race-and-jump-anomaly that he can immediately close holes when he is beaten or help with the piece. Instead of trying to beat him at all, it may be wiser to keep him tight, push him out of balance and then act resolutely before he can regain his tenants.

A gameful of incessant drive also opens other strains of attack. With Knicks up with a point and a minute on the clock, a calm Brunson stepped up to Thompson, which was founded to defend the drive again and sank his only successful pull-up three of the night. Brunson put 17 total points in the fourth, which made all its last five shots to put the game away.

The stylistic transition from last season’s rock match knicks to this season’s softer, smoother, less consistent teams have not always been entertaining. The Karl-Anthony Towns experience is exactly as exciting and crazy as expected. But I had underestimated how good Brunson would look like when I rolled into the huge width in the middle of the floor opened up a cute-shooting center. He is 28 years old and is getting better every year and is leading a team increasingly built in his image to third place in the east. While it would be difficult to argue that Brunson’s development would have followed the same steep curve on another team, it is fun to remember that Dalla’s Mavericks Front Office in 2022 let this guy go for nothing. They certainly couldn’t peak that mistake.