NEW YORK – On a podcast this week, someone asked Jalen Brunson a simple question. He had won the New York Knicks their first championship in 53 years. He had earned Finals MVP. The mayor of New York City had stood at a podium and called him the King of New York. The answer should have been easy.
Brunson did not take it.
“I will never call myself the King of New York,” he told Richard Jefferson, Channing Frye, and Kendrick Perkins on the Road Trippin’ podcast, as Yahoo Sports reported. He explained that self-applying the title would appear overly self-centered. The explanation was measured, almost careful. The way you talk when you have thought about what you are actually saying.
That refusal is, in a specific way, the most interesting thing he has said this offseason. Not because the title is wrong. The city that waited 52 years for what happened last spring is entitled to give out whatever crown it wants. It is interesting because of what the deflection reveals about the weight Brunson understands he is carrying into year two.
The Knicks are trying to do something that only one team has done in the last eight years. The 2018 Golden State Warriors were the last franchise to repeat as NBA champions. What it required then was a healthy Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green all functioning simultaneously, plus an Eastern Conference that was not yet built to stop them. That template is not available to New York. The Knicks won last spring with a depth and a collective defensive IQ that their opponents consistently underestimated. Repeating against a conference that has now seen the full blueprint is a different proposition.
Giannis Antetokounmpo went to Miami. Pat Riley now has a 31-year-old two-time MVP alongside Bam Adebayo. LeBron James signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. The Knicks open the 2026-27 season against LeBron’s 76ers on October 20 at Madison Square Garden, a first test against one of the two teams that have added the most dangerous offensive talent in the conference since June.
Brunson and the people around him have been careful about how they discuss all of this. Not dismissive. His public comments throughout the summer have consistently acknowledged the competition by acknowledging the standard his own season set. What they have avoided is the specific kind of confidence that turns into bulletin-board material for someone else’s locker room.
The “King of New York” deflection is the same instinct at work. The city gave him the title. He handed it back. The logic, as he explained it on Road Trippin’, is that claiming the title publicly makes it about him. What this team’s championship was not about, at least in the version Brunson and his teammates kept telling throughout the run, is any single player. Karl-Anthony Towns played through contract uncertainty with an extension conversation running in the background. OG Anunoby made two defensive plays in the fourth quarter of Game 6 that the city will replay for years. Mikal Bridges and Josh Hart contributed in ways that traditional box-score metrics consistently failed to capture. The machine worked because all of those parts kept working simultaneously.
The one unanswered question heading into this defense is the center position. Mitchell Robinson left in free agency. The Knicks spent the summer in trade discussions for a replacement, with the Pelicans among the teams who showed interest in dealing, but the negotiation moved slowly enough that the uncertainty remains live. What a reliable interior presence does for this team’s defensive identity, and Robinson at full health was a significant part of why their opponents’ paint numbers looked so poor in the playoffs, is a variable that no front-office announcement has resolved.
Brunson averaged 28.4 points in the playoffs last spring. His finishing ability in the fourth quarter, in moments where the other team had designed a defense specifically to stop him, was the closest this team had to a guarantee. He won three ESPY awards in July, including Best NBA Player, in front of a crowd that had waited most of its life for a reason to cheer in June. None of that changed in the four months since the parade.
What changes in year two is the information asymmetry. Every team in the Eastern Conference spent the offseason studying exactly how that championship run happened. The plays that worked in close games in the Finals are known now, charted, accounted for. The teams that upgraded specifically to stop New York have built their preparation around a body of evidence that did not exist 18 months ago. CBS Sports ranks the Knicks second in its preseason power rankings, behind San Antonio, with the caveat that the core returning intact is the strongest argument for them and the center situation is the strongest argument against.
Brunson knows all of this. The refusal of the crown is not modesty in the conventional sense. Players who average 28 points in a championship run understand exactly what they did. It is something more specific: the title belongs to the city, and the pressure belongs to the season ahead. He is keeping those two things separate for as long as he can.
The rest of the league is not interested in letting him.
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