These are the kinds of performances that make Mike Brown look like a genius. After all, the Knicks’ head coach has been the largest proponent of his All-Star guard, Jalen Brunson, being included in conversations for the NBA’s Most Valuable Player of the Year award this season.
Brunson doesn’t give the thought any life. Winning MVP wasn’t bulletin board material when he was dreaming about his pro basketball career as a kid. Performances like this, however, against the Miami Heat on Sunday, make the possibility more real.
Because the best and brightest don’t talk about it. They are about it.
Brunson was about business on Sunday, two days after the Knicks dropped the second leg of a back-to-back against the Philadelphia 76ers on Friday. He scored 47 points to propel the Knicks to a 132-125 victory over the Heat at home and willed his team back to life after falling behind early.
It’s his Madison Square Garden career-high, and the performance marked the fifth highest-scoring game of his career, trailing 48 points in Cleveland (March 31, 2023), 50 points in Phoenix (Dec. 15, 2023), 55 points in Washington, D.C. (Dec. 28, 2024), and his career-high 61 points in San Antonio (March 29, 2024).
“Ball was going through the hoop,” he said with a smile in his walk-off interview after the game.
It’s also the 20th 40-point game of his career, 21st if you include the NBA Cup masterpiece the league scrubs from the stat books. All 21 have come since leaving the Dallas Mavericks for the Knicks in the summer of 2022.
Brunson scored 27 points in the first half alone. He punctuated the second quarter with a step-back three over Miami’s Jaime Jaquez Jr. to cap a run that swung the 10-point Heat lead into a four-point New York advantage entering halftime.
Brown, however, would have liked to leave Brunson on the bench midway through the fourth quarter. Brown wants to decrease minutes for the players he rode to the NBA Cup Final, where Brunson averaged about 40 minutes a night over the three-game slate.
“We changed the rotation a little bit making the [NBA Cup Final] run ‘cause I increased everybody’s minutes,” he said ahead of tipoff. “Now I’m trying to decrease everybody’s minutes. Our last game, I probably played Jalen and Mikal [Bridges] a little bit more than I wanted to, but I’m trying to get that back in control as we speak.”
Brunson logged 30 minutes by the end of the third quarter, when the Knicks had a six-point lead entering the final frame. That lead ballooned to 11 by the 9:50 mark of the fourth quarter. Two turnovers and a bad shot later, Brown looked down his bench. The Heat were on a run again.
Up rose Brunson from his seat along the sideline, to the scorer’s table then onto the court, where he led the Knicks back to extending their lead late. He set The Garden on fire with just under five minutes left in the fourth quarter, when OG Anunoby saved a bad pass from out of bounds, and Brunson caught the ball in the corner and hit a three while falling out of bounds as the shot clock expired.
Bridges scored 24 points in 40 minutes, Anunoby added 18, and Josh Hart scored 13 points, including a buzzer-beating three from near the half-court line in the second half.
Miami’s Kel’el Ware scored a team-high 28 points on 11-of-15 shooting from the field and five-of-seven shooting from 3-point range. Norman Powell added 22 points, and Jaquez Jr. finished with 21 points and five assists. The Knicks held Bam Adebayo to just 14 points and eight rebounds, and Andrew Wiggins had seven points in 24 minutes.
Next up: The Knicks travel to Minnesota to face the Timberwolves in a blast from the past, where Karl-Anthony Towns, who had a nightmare game with two points and six rebounds on Sunday, will return to his NBA stomping grounds as the Knicks face Donte DiVincenzo and Julius Randle, the very players they dealt to acquire Towns two summer ago.
