Jalen Brunson has been playing like the hero of the New York Knicks this season. After averaging 26.0 points, 3.3 rebounds, 6.8 assists, 0.8 steals, and 0.1 blocks per game on 46.7% shooting and 36.9% shooting from three in 2025-26, he’s led his team to the NBA Finals, with just two more wins to go before winning the title.
For Brunson, it’s the ultimate validation of his career and proof that the Dallas Mavericks should never have traded him to begin with. He played in Dallas alongside Luka Doncic for four seasons and even helped take his team to the Finals in 2024. So when the Mavs tried to offer him a “disrespectful” offer, that’s when they knew it was time to move on.
“The Brunson camp basically laughed at them and said, ‘Uh, we’ll take our chances in free agency now, you guys had your chance.’ The Mavs still had the option at that point of picking up the phone and saying, ‘Jalen, we completely screwed this up, we are deeply sorry, we’ve disrespected you, we want to make this right, we’re going to offer you 150 over five.’ They could have even gone to $175 over five,” said Marc Stein. “They had the wherewithal to give Jalen Brunson a blow-away offer, and they didn’t do it.”
In an alternate world where the Mavericks kept Brunson, he and Doncic would have continued to grow and develop their games together. They might be in the Finals right now instead of the young San Antonio Spurs. At the very least, they’d be in a better position to re-tool the roster with a much better return package.
“If they re-signed him, they either could have kept him with Luka or their phone would have been ringing off the hook with trade offers and they would have had so much better optionality… losing Jalen Brunson for nothing when you combine that with how the Luka trade turned out, like I said, where I live there is a lot of pain when the Knicks are on television.”
Today, there’s no denying that giving up Brunson was a bad move for Dallas. While he wasn’t the most glamorous co-star for Luka, he was a reliable scorer who knew how to share the ball. On the Knicks, he’s showing how much value he could have had as a leader, clutch scorer, and secondary playmaker in the backcourt. Unfortunately, we’ll never get to find out for ourselves.
While many changes are expected in Dallas this summer, it’s too late to bring Jalen back. He’s as committed as it gets to the Knicks, and he’s about to be immortalized as a hero of the franchise. In one single run, he has made the Mavs look like fools for paying him his worth, but he’s not even thinking about that now. With so much at stake, Brunson is focused only on the present and what else he can do to lead his team to a title. Just like the Mavericks regret trading Luka, they regret letting Brunson go, and that decision is what ultimately got GM Nico Harrison fired.
