It’s the existential question that will hover over the Knicks until proven otherwise: Can a team win a championship with a small, less-athletic guard like the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson as their best player?
“Tough. It’s tough,” former NBA guard Tim Legler, now ESPN’s top NBA analyst, told The Post. “Even if you just took out the ‘not as athletic’ component, and you just said ‘at his size as your highest-volume shot-taker,’ just look historically how many teams have done that.”
Legler points to past examples to illustrate his point. “Let’s take a smaller guard that won a championship. Take an Isiah Thomas, for example; look at the balance on their scoring. You didn’t have the discrepancy that you have here where your leading scorer is seven points better than your next leading scorer. Then there’s another five-point drop before you get to your third leading scorer.”
“The teams that have done it and won it all with a guy that size as your top shotmaker have been more balanced teams. Chauncey Billups was a little bit bigger than that but still was a grounded player. He wasn’t a super athletic guy; strong base, all that kind of stuff. Look at the balance on that team.”
Entering Saturday’s game against the Suns at Madison Square Garden, Brunson averaged more than six more shots per game than the next closest teammate, Karl-Anthony Towns. In contrast, during the Detroit Pistons’ championship seasons in 1988-89 and 1989-90, Isiah Thomas was around two more shots per game than any of his teammates. And on the 2003-04 Pistons championship team, Billups wasn’t even the leading scorer or shot-taker; it was Richard Hamilton.
The only recent example of a smaller guard winning a championship as the lead scorer is Stephen Curry. The reigning champion Thunder have a guard in Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as their best player and top scorer, but he is much bigger at 6-foot-6 and much more athletic.
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Unlike the Knicks, Oklahoma City was also an elite defensive team, similar to those Pistons squads.
“It’s not as easy,” former longtime NBA coach Stan Van Gundy, now an “NBA on Prime Video” analyst, told The Post. “Small guards in today’s game are not easy because you can’t switch as much. Steph Curry has shown us that certainly you don’t have to be a big guard to play on a championship-level team. One of the things that Steph has done throughout the course of his career is he has really improved at the defensive end.”
Van Gundy adds, “It’s one of the things in my preparation [for Warriors games]. Teams try to go at him, but it’s not that easy anymore. He has great pride in what he does at the defensive end. Can you have somebody that size on a championship team be the best player? Yep, you can. Is it easy? No.”
Looking back over the past decade, the non-Warriors championship teams have been led by players like LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as their best player and top scorer.
The discourse became a national talking point when Becky Hammon, then an ESPN analyst, said two years ago that Brunson is too small to be a “1A dude” capable of leading a team to a championship. Allen Iverson and Steve Nash were examples she used as precedent.
Since then, the Knicks have added depth around Brunson with players like Karl-Anthony Towns, OG Anunoby and Mikal Bridges, rather than using resources to land a superstar like Antetokounmpo that could potentially make Brunson more of a second option.
Legler sums it up: “It’s a smaller guy, highest usage rate, biggest shot taker, kind of know exactly what’s gonna happen late in games. Being honest? It’s not easy, it’s very rarely been done in the history of the league. That’s what they’re trying to pull off and it’s not an easy thing to do.”
The silver lining, according to Legler, is Brunson’s efficiency. “Most guys his size aren’t this efficient. Most guys his size that shoot that much do not shoot 48 percent from the field. They don’t shoot 40 percent from the 3-point line. Most of those guys, in that size range that take a lot of shots, are in the low 40s. They’re 34 percent from the three. That’s way more typical than what Brunson does.”
Brunson has defied expectations throughout his career. But the vast majority of recent NBA history remains a challenge to overcome.
https://nypost.com/2026/01/17/sports/smaller-jalen-brunson-leading-knicks-to-nba-title-is-tough-task-nba-analysts/
