One memory that remains vivid for Greg Brittenham, a Knicks assistant in 1999, was how comfortable Brunson appeared in Madison Square Garden even as a toddler.
“One time I walked up in the green room before the game, and he comes walking out with a whole big plastic cup of M&M’s, and I think that was his dinner that night,” Brittenham said. “He ate an entire cup.”
In New York, Brunson has transformed into the rarest class of NBA star — one capable of being the best player on a championship team, which was even more impressive considering his small stature. Last season, the Knicks made the conference finals for the first time since 2000. Amid their bid for a championship this spring, the Knicks have won 11 consecutive playoff games with Brunson as the team’s undisputed star and his dad as an assistant coach.
“To be able to coach his son, to get back to the Finals, is a great story for sure, and what it’s about is creating great memories,” said Charlie Ward, a guard on the 1999 Knicks.
It was common for the children of players and coaches to be around the team, at both games and practices. Dudley regularly brought his year-and-a-half-old son, Charles, to the locker room in 1999. Ewing’s son was a ball boy, as was a young man Ward mentored as part of a “big brother” program. Brittenham took his daughter and son to work and said his daughter, Rachel, would watch over Jalen before games.
“You could tell that Rick loved his son and took a lot of pride, and his face lit up when he had Jalen with him,” Dudley said.
As Jalen blossomed into an NBA star, home videos went viral of him when he was a preteen running up hills and training for long hours under the tough coaching of his father. His mother once told ESPN she worried it would turn Jalen off of basketball. Rick’s former teammates don’t find it surprising that he challenged Jalen to work hard. On a ’99 Knicks team that took pride in outworking opponents — it advanced to the Finals despite being its conference’s eighth seed — Rick was the model for that relentless attitude.
When Rick Brunson joined the Knicks in the fall of 1998, it was the second year of a peripatetic career in which he played for eight teams in nine seasons. He was on “the edge of the league,” Dudley said, needing to scrap just to hold on to a job. Brittenham worked with Brunson before games and said they made a pact to run the stairs of every arena in the league.
“He had that tenacity that he would instill in some of the superstar players we had,” Brittenham said. “I’ve had probably, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 players in 20 years, and he’d be my top 10 hardest-working players.”
