Knicks Fan Rich: Jalen Brunson’s Talent & Drive are Matched Only by His...Superstitiousness???

Jalen Brunson will not be in the same room as the Larry O'Brien Trophy. He reportedly refused to enter spaces where it was present during the NBA Finals lead-up, which landed as the most telling detail of this entire postseason run.

Rich has been watching the Knicks since the Patrick Ewing lottery, from the back of a blue Pontiac Safari station wagon on the way to his aunt and uncle's house in New Jersey. He was listening to 1010 WINS when the news came through. He lived through the Jordan years, through Charles Smith still missing layups, through the 1999 team that lost to the Spurs. He has earned the right to deliver this particular breakdown with full emotional investment.

And the numbers he laid out for Brunson are genuinely hard to process. Since 2023, the NBA tracks a metric called clutch points in the playoffs, defined as points scored with five minutes remaining in a game of a certain closeness. Jason Tatum has 65 of those. Nikola Jokic has 69. SGA, coming off back-to-back MVPs, has 84. Jalen Brunson has 144.

"That is not a misprint," Rich said. "144 of them."

In Game 1 against San Antonio, Brunson took a knee to his leg when Landry Shamet shoved Harrison Barnes into him. Then he rolled his ankle after Luke Cornett stepped on it. Josh Hart was on the bench with three fouls. Things were not going the Knicks' way. OG Anunoby got hot in the third quarter. Karl-Anthony Towns had 10 of his 18 points in that third quarter. And then Brunson simply took over, scoring 13 of his game-high 30 points in the fourth quarter.

Rich noted that over the Knicks' last 12 playoff games, they have 12 wins, with a margin of victory of 272 points. "There's never been that large of a margin of victory over a 12-game stretch ever by anybody at any time, regular or postseason."

The Brunson superstition sound bite came from ESPN's Malika Andrews, who asked him directly why he refused to be near the Larry O'Brien Trophy even when it was set up for promotional shoots. Brunson's answer: "How'd you hear about that? No comment."

Rich's verdict was immediate: "He's going full AC Green with the trophy here. He's abstaining."

There is something to this. NFL coaches have been known to turn away from the Lombardi on the eve of the Super Bowl. Hockey players famously will not touch the conference championship trophy. It is a mindset that tends to track with winning. "And then what do most of those people do? They then win it all," Rich pointed out.

The road win in Game 1 was the first Knicks road win in the NBA Finals since Game 2 of 1994. Before that, you have to go back to 1953 against George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers for the last time they won their first road game in a Finals. The last time they won their first Finals road game was when Willis Reed dropped 38 on Wilt in 1970, just up the road in Los Angeles.

Rich said it plainly: if Brunson does anything close to what he did in Game 1 over the next three to six games, "the guy's going to have a statue in front of Madison Square Garden. It's a fact."

The launching pad is right there. The Spurs also have, as Rich noted, "a very tall Frenchman." But Brunson won't look at the trophy. Won't touch it. Won't be in the room.

That is the right amount of insane.