CHARLESTON, S.C. — Josh Hart has established the court-away-from-the-court. You need to know this.
“I’m the Duke of Manhattan,” Hart announced Wednesday, a few minutes after the Knicks had broken up practice at McAlister Field House on the campus of The Citadel. “OG [Anunoby], he can be the Duke of Queens. Mikal is the Duke of the Bronx.”
Presumably, that’ll leave both Brooklyn and Staten Island to the royal Stretch-5-in-waiting, Karl-Anthony Towns, whose acquisition the team was finally allowed to officially announce Wednesday afternoon.
“Can’t be Mikal in Brooklyn” Hart laughed. “We stole him from there.”
There is one unmistakable ruler in the room, and the rest of the members of his court happily serve at his pleasure. His name is Jalen Brunson.
“He’s the King of New York,” Hart said.
In basketball, that’s for certain, and the chasm between Brunson and No. 2 may be as wide as the two Southamptons, the one on the South Fork and the one south of London. But after only three years, his star already burns so bright that he is either 1 or 1A when it comes to all professional athletes in greater New York.
That was wonderfully illustrated on the night of July 24, when he walked onto the field at Yankee Stadium, as good a place as any to host the constellation of stars on the field late that afternoon.
Jalen Milroe, who within two months would establish himself as the most electric college football player in the land quarterbacking Alabama, was there, and he looked like a wide-eyed kid when he embraced Brunson during batting practice.
Francisco Lindor was there, just as he was amping up his case to be a candidate for MVP in the National League, and the two of them hugged, too, and posed arm-in-arm for pictures. Anthony Volpe was waiting with one of his No. 11 jerseys, and he handed that over to Brunson at the same time Brunson gave Volpe his own orange-and-blue 11.
Brunson threw out the ceremonial first pitch to a thunderous roar, making his pitch (naturally) from the rubber and not in front, and throwing a letter-high strike (naturally) to Yankees pitcher Marcus Stroman.
But the coup de grace was the few minutes he spent with Aaron Judge, who is Lennon to Brunson’s McCartney, Rogers to his Hammerstein, and you can be the jury on who deserves to be on the left and who deserves to be on the right of the ampersand linking Brunson & Judge, or Judge & Brunson.
Judge, for one, seemed to cast his vote with the autograph he scrawled on the pair of baseball cleats he gifted Brunson:
“To Jalen: Keep running the city! From ’22 AL MVP.”
Brunson just took it in.
It was probably the highlight of Brunson’s summer, unless you count the day he voluntarily left about $100 million on the table to make the Knicks’ future-salary cap restrictions a bit more flexible, unless you count the day he was named team captain, unless you count just about every day since Game 7 in May when Knicks fans would start talking about this season, all of those conversations referencing Brunson within the first sentence or two.
“Seriously, it’s dope how he’s done it and how he carries himself,” said Hart, his friend for 10 years and his teammate for three, the last two with the Knicks. “He doesn’t let that stuff get to his head. He’s as hungry as he’s ever been. It’s good when you have your captain getting that much love and that much notoriety and still being the same person.”
It’s good that Brunson has friends willing to talk about this because his face still tightens to a wince when he’s asked about himself, and he quickly steers the subject back to his team and his teammates. You might cynically wonder if that’s just a crafted conceit unless you consider that he’s so far 7,391-for-7,391 acting the exact same way across all 26 months that he’s been a Knick.
“The mental part, his make-up, it doesn’t surprise me at all,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “It’s how he’s handled everything his whole life. It’s also what drives him. His high-school career was very similar, his college career, and his pro career has taken on the same path. He continually gets better and that’s what makes him so special. He’s never satisfied.”
If you talk to Aaron Boone about Judge, and if you see the way Judge is forever deflecting praise elsewhere, you can see why he and Brunson seemed to hit it off so famously. They are 1 and 1A in New York right now, the respective sovereigns of their sporting kingdoms, each seeking the deed to one last elusive province.
The Canyon of Heroes.
