Every May, a player puts up a plus-minus number big enough to stop traffic, and the basketball internet splits into two predictable camps. One group treats the number as holy scripture. The other points out — correctly — that plus-minus is a blunt instrument that tells you almost as much about teammates and coaching as it does about the player himself. Both camps then argue past each other for a week.
Jalen Brunson currently leads all 2026 playoff players in plus-minus at +210 across 13 games. The number is big enough that neither camp can simply dismiss the other. So instead of picking a side, let’s do something more useful: interrogate the stat with the tools we actually have.
What Does Plus-Minus Actually Measure — and What Doesn’t It?
Plus-minus records the point differential when a specific player is on the floor. When Brunson plays, the Knicks outscore their opponents. When he doesn’t, they don’t outscore their opponents by as much — or at all. That’s the full definition, and its limitation is obvious the moment you state it plainly.
A player can accumulate a massive plus-minus by never sharing the floor with the bad rotation players. He can run it up by playing heavy minutes with an elite supporting cast. He can benefit from a coaching staff that removes him from lineup combinations that bleed points. The stat captures all of those conditions equally. It has no mechanism for sorting out “this player made his teammates better” from “this player happened to be present while his teammates were great.”
The honest starting point, then, is this: any Knick who played all 13 games in this postseason is going to have an elevated plus-minus. The Knicks posted the best 9-game point differential in NBA playoff history during their win streak — +212, topping the 1972-73 Bucks (+209) and the 2018-19 Rockets (+206). Their net rating across that stretch was +24.3, built on a 126.6 offensive rating and a 102.3 defensive rating. Those numbers describe a historically dominant team. Being on that team inflates your plus-minus. Full stop.
The correct question is not whether that inflation exists — it does — but whether it can account for all of +210. That requires looking at what happens when Brunson is actually off the floor.
How +210 Stacks Up Against NBA Playoff History
Before getting into the on/off data, it’s worth calibrating the size of the number. Playoff plus-minus is inherently noisier than regular-season plus-minus because the sample sizes are smaller, the opponents are better, and variance is higher. A +210 across 13 games — roughly 35 minutes per game — represents a sustained separation that is genuinely unusual.
For cross-era context: the all-time career playoff plus-minus leaders are LeBron James (+1,234), Tim Duncan (+1,090), and Stephen Curry (+971). Those numbers took years of deep playoff runs to accumulate. Single-season plus-minus peaks are harder to compare systematically because the leaderboards weren’t consistently tracked at this granularity before the mid-2000s. What’s clear is that a +210 through 13 games puts Brunson in historically thin company for a single postseason.
The key caveat, which any honest analysis has to flag: this is an exceptional team producing exceptional results. The number is almost certainly above what you’d see Brunson produce on an average team running an average offense. That’s not a knock on him. That’s how team sports work.
The On/Off Split That Settles the Lineup-Artifact Question
Here is where the analysis gets genuinely interesting, and where you need to hold two data points in tension rather than cherry-pick the one that confirms your prior.
During the regular season, the Knicks held opponents to 7.9 fewer points per 100 possessions when Brunson was on the floor — a defensive rating of 112.7 with him versus 120.6 without him. That’s a substantial gap, and it suggests the “Brunson as defensive anchor” narrative has real regular-season support.
The playoff on/off data complicates this. Reporting from The Ringer on the Knicks’ 2026 run found that New York actually holds opponents to roughly 10.2 fewer points per 100 possessions when Brunson sits. That is analytically counterintuitive — and if you’re building a case that the +210 is entirely real, you have to confront it rather than wave it away.
What likely explains the discrepancy: when Brunson sits, Mike Brown’s replacement lineups deploy more defensive-specialist combinations. Brunson is an above-average defensive point guard, not an elite one. The units that replace him in staggered minutes lean harder on wing defenders and disruptive schemes. Defensive rating improving when a star sits is not unprecedented; it often reflects a coaching staff deploying its best defensive personnel together precisely when the star needs rest.
The more meaningful on/off signal is net rating, not defensive rating alone. And on net rating, the directionality is unambiguous: the Knicks are a dramatically better team when Brunson plays than when he doesn’t. The defensive advantage of his rest minutes doesn’t come close to compensating for what the offense loses. For comparison, the Cavaliers’ net rating drops from +4.7 to +0.9 without Donovan Mitchell — a signal the analytics community treats as evidence of Mitchell’s value. Brunson’s gap is wider.
59.5% True Shooting and the Efficiency Context
Here is where the individual performance data starts carrying its own weight, separate from the team context.
Across 13 playoff games, Brunson is averaging 27.8 points, 6.7 assists, and 2.8 rebounds on 48.9% field goal shooting and 59.5% true shooting. True shooting above 55% at high volume is considered efficient for any player at any position. At 59.5% TS while handling the second-highest usage on a 13-game playoff team, it’s quietly exceptional.
https://x.com/statmuse/status/2049315164101427322
In ECF Game 1, Brunson scored 38 points, with 15 coming in the fourth quarter alone — orchestrating the biggest fourth-quarter comeback in NBA playoff history. In Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals on May 23, he posted 30 points, 6 assists, and 3 rebounds on 10-of-19 shooting in a 121-108 Knicks win that pushed New York to a 3-0 series lead.
Two structural shifts make these numbers particularly meaningful. Under the previous coaching regime, Brunson ran on-ball pick-and-roll or isolation on 48.5% of his possessions in the 2025 playoffs. That number dropped to 45.2% in 2026 under Mike Brown — meaning he’s producing comparable volume with a slightly smaller usage footprint. Simultaneously, his unassisted shot share fell from 80.7% to 64.3%. More of his made baskets are coming from system offense rather than pure creation. Karl-Anthony Towns has already assisted Brunson 15 times this postseason after assisting him just 4 times across all of last year.
What this tells you: Brunson’s efficiency hasn’t held up despite better shot quality — it’s held up inside a new offensive system that asks different things from him, while KAT’s gravity creates assisted opportunities the previous coaching scheme never generated. That’s system integration, not statistical inflation.
So Is the Number Real? A Framework Verdict
The framework exercise is only useful if it produces a conclusion.
The +210 is inflated. Any player on this Knicks team, logging the same minutes, on the same winning side of a historically dominant 9-game run, would have an elevated plus-minus. That is not an asterisk on Brunson specifically — it is a structural fact about how the stat works, and it applies to every player on every dominant team in playoff history.
But inflation does not mean fabrication. When you run the framework test — when you ask what the team looks like without this player on the floor — the data points in one direction. The net rating gap with and without Brunson is not a rounding error. The defensive rating complication is real, but it’s a footnote to a much larger offensive story. At 59.5% true shooting across 13 games, 27.8 points per night, with a usage profile that’s slightly lower than last year rather than higher, Brunson is producing efficiently at scale, not just riding a wave.
The strongest version of the skeptic’s argument would require showing that the Knicks’ net rating is roughly neutral when he sits, that his efficiency is being propped up by assisted opportunities he didn’t create, and that the on/off gap closes once you adjust for lineup quality. None of those conditions hold. The net rating gap is real. His efficiency predates the current cast — he’s been a high-TS playoff scorer for two consecutive seasons. And the lineup adjustment problem cuts both ways: Brunson also loses lineup partners when he sits.
Growing up watching Steph Curry’s efficiency reshape how the league thought about spacing, I’ve spent years watching advanced metrics tell stories that raw stats missed. Plus-minus tells stories that raw stats miss too — when the sample is large enough and the on/off split is honest about what it’s measuring. Thirteen games is not a large sample by regular-season standards. It is a substantial sample by playoff standards, and the +210 is directionally consistent with every other indicator we have on this player’s impact.
The number is real enough. Not perfectly real. Not context-free. But real enough that dismissing it because the stat is blunt would miss the point of the stat entirely — which is to give you a reason to look harder. The harder look says Brunson is the reason this Knicks team is 11-2.
