Culture
Rising star: Knicks' Jalen Brunson is finally receiving the recognition he deserves
After yet another disappointing, early-season loss, Jalen Brunson stood at his locker, ready to speak with the media in Milwaukee.
As the point guard turned around, straight-faced as usual following the Knicks’ fourth defeat in six games, he donned a homemade T-shirt, all black and with white lettering on it, that appeared as if it were straight off the Vistaprint presses.
Across Brunson’s chest read a familiar idiom: The magic is in the work.
“This is a Sandra Brunson production,” Brunson said, referencing his mother, who stamped the family’s longtime motto onto the crewneck. Of course, “The magic is in the work” is not a Brunson family original.
Anyone who knows Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau has a Pavlovian relationship with that expression. Those 19 letters form his favorite saying. Find anyone who has been around the coach, mention that the magic is in the work and prepare for that person either to quip about Thibodeau or to go into an impression of a man who has dedicated his life to basketball.
Years ago, Brunson’s father, Rick, who played for Thibodeau when he was a player and when Thibodeau was an assistant coach with the Knicks in the 1990s, had ripped the parlance for himself. He and Sandra have repeated it to Jalen for two and a half decades. Rick is somewhat of a Thibodeau loyalist. He played for him in New York, where the two grew close. He was an assistant for Thibodeau in the head coach’s first stop in Chicago, his second in Minnesota and now his third in New York.
Rick would take his son to the office during those years. Thibodeau remembers back in the 1990s when Jalen was not just too small for stardom but too small for grade school and would show up to Knicks practices with ready-made impressions of the team’s top players. He did Latrell Sprewell, Allan Houston, Patrick Ewing and Larry Johnson.
“He had it spot-on,” Thibodeau said. “He was, like, 6 (years old) and he had all their moves down.”
Thibodeau could never have known then that he would eventually become the head coach of that franchise. Even less so, he could not have predicted that Rick’s son would be the leader of his squad — and, as of Thursday, would officially become an NBA All-Star for the first time in his career.
No one in the clique could have guessed the engineer of that team, one that would shatter a seemingly never-ending stretch of Knicks-induced depression among its fan base, would be Rick Brunson’s at-the-time agent, Leon Rose, who would eventually work his way up at CAA, which also represents Thibodeau, to run the agency’s basketball division before the Knicks would hire him away to become their team president in 2020.
After Jalen signed with the Knicks two years ago, he provided a one-word response as to why: “Family.” He didn’t just hope to work for his father; Rose was there, too. He wanted to play for Thibodeau, the hyper-intense basketball addict he’d known since he was too young to remember. And it’s not like the Knicks had swiped away someone who was just as coveted everywhere else.
Brunson’s former team, the Dallas Mavericks, had chosen not to offer him an extension that would have been approximately half of the $104 million he eventually signed with the Knicks, a contract that was widely critiqued as an overpay. Today, it’s one of the NBA’s most team-friendly deals.
This has not been the trajectory of a typical All-Star. Brunson was a three-year collegiate constant, a second-round pick who didn’t play much as a rookie and who didn’t regularly start until his fourth professional season. He’s shorter than his peers, can barely dunk and is more obsessive about pivots than he is about crossovers.
Of all the parallel universes in existence, this is the only one where Brunson becomes an All-Star with this team in this city playing for this team president and this coach while also becoming the face of an organizational turnaround. And yet, it’s happening.
When the NBA announced the All-Star reserves Thursday, two Knicks popped up: Julius Randle, who is now an All-Star for the third time in four seasons, and Brunson, who made it for the first time.
Randle’s emergence is unconventional, as well. The Los Angeles Lakers selected him in the 2014 lottery but let him walk in free agency once his first NBA contract expired. He signed a one-year, bet-on-himself contract with the New Orleans Pelicans, who let him go after that season, too. After a chase for Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant ended with the two stars heading to the Brooklyn Nets, the Knicks turned to Randle, handing him a shorter-term deal for less money.
No one could have guessed that four and a half years later, a New York basketball team would capture the heart of the city behind its two All-Stars — and neither of them would be Durant or Irving.
“The thing that’s special is they’re self-made,” Thibodeau said. “It wasn’t given to them, and they’ve earned it. We’re proud of them.”
This was never supposed to happen. And yet, we’re watching the same events transpire night after night.
The Knicks are 32-17 on the season, winners of nine consecutive games. It’s as if they have chosen to stop losing. They are 15-2 since Jan. 1. Each night, someone new gets hurt, and it doesn’t seem to matter. Mitchell Robinson underwent ankle surgery in December, but the team has held up with Isaiah Hartenstein proving he’s first-string caliber since. And of late, the roster is falling apart.
Randle dislocated his shoulder less than a week ago. He missed his first game Monday. That same night, OG Anunoby had to sit because of inflammation in his elbow. He hasn’t played in the three games since. A day later, Quentin Grimes took a hit to the knee, which is now sprained, sidelining him.
The Knicks were missing four rotation players Thursday night. Thibodeau is breaking the laws of time, running his favorites for 59 minutes in regulation games. And yet, they just keep winning.
They wrecked the Charlotte Hornets on Monday, destroyed the respectable Utah Jazz the following evening and roared back from down 15 to top the ever-exciting Indiana Pacers 109-105 on Thursday.
Somehow, the Knicks, a team more associated with squalor than ballers for the past 23 years, are a half-game out of second place in the Eastern Conference. And it’s difficult to look anywhere but at Brunson.
Thursday’s performance was his masterpiece: a 40-point showing against a defense that threw anything it could at him. With the Knicks short-handed, the Pacers double-teamed him from the start. They were physical with Brunson as Brunson normally is with whomever he’s competing against — enough so that near the end of the game, Brunson took a smack to the face and collapsed to the floor only for whistles to be swallowed.
On the next play, Brunson scored an and-1, giving New York a one-point lead with under two minutes to go.
“One A, 1B, it doesn’t matter. The dude is an All-Star. He’s (having) an MVP-caliber season right now,” Donte DiVincenzo said. “He should be the player of the month this month. What else can I say? The dude’s doing everything he possibly can for us to win games. It’s not easy right now with Julius going down, OG going down, Mitch not being here. Everything’s been thrown against us and he’s still willing us to win games.”
Brunson is now averaging 27.1 points, a career-high, to go with 6.4 assists on the season. On Thursday, he had his fifth 40-point game over the Knicks’ first 49 games. He’s gone for 30-plus 19 times. Of the 534 players who have scored a point so far this season, only three, a trio of MVP candidates, have totaled more than Brunson: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Luka Dončić.
This story, this career was meant to occur only in dreams.
If Rose hadn’t come to the Knicks, if he hadn’t hired Thibodeau immediately upon his arrival, if Thibodeau hadn’t become close with Rick 25 years ago, if Rick hadn’t been a lifelong Rose loyalist, if Rick’s and Rose’s kids hadn’t been so close for so long that Rose’s son, Sam, hadn’t grown up to become Jalen’s agent, this player with this background probably does not become an All-Star for this team.
But, somehow, it happened. Brunson has become one of the NBA’s least likely All-Stars, only the 21st second-round pick to make an All-Star Game since the league implemented a two-round draft in 1989. And somehow, the Knicks have followed in his stead.
They’ve acquired his best friends from Villanova: DiVincenzo, Josh Hart and Ryan Arcidiacono. Somehow, all those players have turned into no-brainer roster additions. Somehow, they were able to add Anunoby, who is the personification of this group’s new identity: hard-nosed, defensive-minded and team-oriented.
It starts at the top.
The Knicks have gone out of their way to sign Thibodeau-minded players: Ones who care about defense first, ones who will dive into the stands with three minutes to go in a 20-point game. But it helps when your best player plays that way, too.
“When your All-Star and your leader does it, it sets the standard,” Hart said. “But that’s something that each of us take pride in.”
In a league where some teams create rules discouraging players from diving for balls in practice scrimmages just because they can’t risk a leading performer injuring himself, Brunson takes charges in practice. He is one of two guys on the team, along with Arcidiacono, who does it. He leads the NBA in offensive fouls drawn. He is a star who carries himself like a role player, probably because he wasn’t supposed to be much above that.
He was not supposed to go for 40 this often. He was not supposed to be the one whom Knicks fans stayed late for just so they could lose their voices.
After the win over the Pacers on Thursday, MSG’s Alan Hahn approached Brunson for the typical postgame, on-court interview, the audio of which is played throughout the arena as well as on television. Of course, this was not your usual game.
Brunson had just gone for 40 points against a defense that was swarming him. He’d officially made All-Star only hours earlier. The 20,000 in attendance were the rowdiest of any group that had filled up Madison Square Garden so far this season. When the Knicks are rolling, and the fan base knows it, these games turn into another kind of event.
Most of those masses didn’t leave once the game ended. Instead, they waited for Brunson to begin his interview. Hahn asked about the night, about Brunson finally sneaking onto an All-Star team after he bore the label of the token snub a season ago. But even with the mic turned up, you could barely hear Hahn over the thousands who remained in the arena screeching “MVP!” chants.
Brunson, who’s not known for his public displays of emotion, choked up. He couldn’t bring himself to talk.
“It was cool the whole experience, how we won, obviously what happened before the game,” Brunson said. “You always work for certain moments but you never know how to react once they happen. It was special.”
That moment was not just about Thursday night — not just about a team that’s played like the best in the NBA for a month or a player who has reinvigorated a formerly woeful franchise and improbably vaulted into the land of the elite. There’s no questioning it: the Knicks’ constant hunt for an All-NBA performer, a topic ever since Rose took over the front office four years ago, needs to be reframed. This is definitively not a hunt for a star; it’s a hunt for another star.
No one could have seen this coming, except for maybe a person or three who has known Brunson since he was pre-K.
“There’s always been naysayers,” Thibodeau said. “And he always proves them wrong.”
(Photo of Jalen Brunson: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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