Rick Brunson got nine seconds of NBA Finals basketball in 1999 and somehow that turned out to be enough for the universe to hand his son a championship ring 27 years later.
Game 5, Friday night, the Knicks beat the Spurs 94-90 and ended 53 years of torture. Jalen Brunson, Finals MVP, unanimous, 11-0, scored 45 points. Fifteen of them came in the fourth quarter when the whole city held its breath. He went 14-of-27 from the field, 4-of-7 from three, 13-of-15 from the line. He joined Jordan, Giannis, and Bob Pettit as the only players in NBA history to score 45 or more in a closeout game. The Knicks won their first title since 1973. And Rick Brunson stood on the sideline in an assistant coach’s polo and watched every second of it.
That sentence still doesn’t feel real.
Rick played for the Knicks in those 1999 Finals, the last time New York and San Antonio met before this series. He was a reserve on a reserve’s reserves. The Spurs won 4-1. The only game New York won was Game 3, and Rick played nine seconds. Nine. He saw the court for the length of a TV timeout. His son was three years old at the time, presumably unaware any of this was happening.
Now Rick is an assistant coach on the same franchise. Same city, same organization, 27 years compressed into one moment on the floor.
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The internet clocked it immediately, because of course it did. Rick Brunson: nine seconds, 1999. Jalen Brunson: 45 points, Finals MVP, 2026. The whole Knicks bloodline contained in a single stat line. They’re the first father-son duo to each appear in the NBA Finals with the same franchise — a fact that would feel too scripted for a sports movie.
After the buzzer, Rick told reporters to “tell Mark Cuban thank you” — a shot at the Mavericks, who let Jalen walk in 2022 free agency. It’s a very specific kind of satisfaction, the kind you can only feel if you watched your kid get disrespected by a franchise and then watched him win everything. Jalen said: “It’s everything we ever dreamed of. It’s why I came to New York.”
You can look up his ECF MVP run if you want a timeline of how he got here.
Everything we laid out before the series started makes the tactical case for why he was always going to dominate Wembanyama in a halfcourt series. None of that matters as much as Rick Brunson standing there watching his kid do the thing he never got to do in the building where they both wore the same jersey.
https://x.com/BarackObama/status/2066416082991174087
Obama tweeted his congratulations. The Garden erupted. Jalen Brunson NBA Finals 2026 unanimous MVP — the first Knick to carry them to a title since Willis Reed limped out of the tunnel.
Nine seconds for Rick. The whole trophy for Jalen. I’ve watched that fourth quarter seventeen times and I still can’t believe it happened to a team I love.
