Jalen Brunson’s path to the Knicks was never supposed to be simple, and one old Mavericks trade idea makes that road look even more twisted.
Dallas once had a chance to reshape the 2020 NBA Draft board by offering “the 18th pick, the 31st pick, and a backup point guard named Jalen Brunson” in pursuit of a premium lottery selection, ESPN’s Tim MacMahon said on The Hoop Collective’s live show in Manilla. The deal never happened, but if it had, the ripple effects could have changed a lot more than just the Mavericks’ draft night.
For New York, the alternate version is easy to imagine. Brunson might have become the same kind of problem for the Knicks that Tyrese Haliburton has been for other teams - only this time, maybe in the wrong uniform. The source of the what-if runs straight through the 2020 draft, where the Knicks had a chance to get involved but instead chose Obi Toppin with Leon Rose beginning his run in charge.
The draft slotting around New York only adds to the intrigue. The five picks before the Knicks and the next pick after them all belonged to Eastern Conference teams, which means Brunson’s rise could have played out in a way that put him squarely in the conference mix from the start. One possibility in the source: he might have ended up as a member of the Indiana Pacers if they had later moved Domantas Sabonis for another young guard.
That’s the part Knicks fans can’t help but circle back to. Brunson was Luka Dončić’s second fiddle in Dallas before becoming the face of his own story, and the idea that he could have landed in a different place - or even started his climb somewhere else in the East - only sharpens the irony.
Haliburton, for his part, wasn’t taken until Sacramento grabbed him at No. 12, though reports said his representation helped him slide down the board. If Dallas had gotten into the lottery mix, the entire draft could have bent in a different direction.
And that leads to the bigger dominoes. Would the Mavericks have ever traded Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers? Would Brunson have still ended up in New York, where his not-literal-Godfather remains the President of Basketball Operations?
Those questions hang over a 2020 draft class that already looks like a do-over waiting to happen for a lot of lottery teams. Charlotte got it right by taking LaMelo Ball at No.
- After that, the board gets messy fast.
Brunson would have found his way to stardom almost anywhere. The Knicks just got lucky enough to be the place where it happened.
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