If Jalen Brunson pulled a Kawhi Leonard, I’m done with the Knicks

As Ballmergate continues to leak new details daily — or, depending on your stance, KawhiGate or UncleDennisgate — there is a growing sense the scandal is a $28 million canary in a big ol’ expensive coal mine called the NBA.

Some sports fans want to forever segregate the games they love from politics, social justice or anywhere people are suffering who shouldn’t be. If you’ve read me before, you know I don’t. A well-meaning work comrade once defended me after someone complained about my mixing of mediums. “Anyone who’s ever read Miranda knows he always brings politics into his sportswriting.” They meant well, but that’s never how I’ve thought about it.

We live in a world of constantly intersecting worlds. To write about people, period — athletes or otherwise — as if they exist in a vacumn apart from the rest of us is a child’s fantasy. Some people are rich enough to never give a damn. Not me, and never mine.

When Pablo Torre broke the news that former employees at the now-defunct Aspiration claimed Leonard was given a $28 million no-show endorsement deal to circumvent the salary cap, I thought “They’re def guilty, they’re too rich and powerful to get in any trouble, and Adam Silver is the owners’ mouthpiece incarnate. Ballmer’s the richest owner in the league. They’ll kill this story off in a week or so.” Turns out life has a funny, funny way . . .

This story matters, for so many reasons. The NBA’s latest collective bargaining agreement is a punishment pact its fans never asked for. The onsett of free agency used to be as exciting a week as any in the NBA calendar. The dynamics at play as player power grew, most publicly via LeBron James in 2010 and Kevin Durant in 2016, offended the owners, i.e. dozens of billionaires used to floating above any and all concern in their bubbles of impunity. The fans — materially fundamental to the league, yet materially neglected by it — looooove free agency. Remember DeAndre Jordan and the emoji wars? This past offseason, the biggest player to switch teams was Myles Turner. The most suspenseful story has been Jonathan Kuminga and Quentin Grimes having staring contests with restricted free agency.

Whoopee.

Meanwhile, the league insists the new CBA is necessary to create more parity, insisting that’s what the fans want. Were you lucky enough to witness the 1960s Celtics? The ‘80s Celtics and Lakers? The ‘90s Bulls? The Shaq/Kobe Lakers? The Heatles? The Steph Warriors? You know what the reaction was as those teams ascended? Excitement. Tension. Drama. Could anyone knock them off their perch? If not, where did they stack up historically?

Not only does dismissing dynasties ignore the essential work 60 years of non-parity did making the league into what it is, what an insult to the legacies of teams like the Minneapolis Lakers, the Dr. J 76ers, Don Nelson’s Bucks, the ‘90s Knicks, the Rasheed Wallace Trail Blazers and the James Harden/Chris Paul Rockets. That’d be like applauding over-stressed, exhausted hospital workers in the early days of a terrifying, death-spiraling pandemic, only to have more and more children dying of treatable diseases like measles and whooping cough because too many too-comfortable people think science is black magic.

When you’re on your deathbed, you think the Raptor-Laker-Buck-Warrior-Nugget-Celtic-Thunder one-and-done era of champions is gonna appear in the parade of life memories flashing before your eyes? (I included the Thunder ‘cuz the Knicks are winning the title this year, natch).

In politics and in sports, fuck-you money has become an infestation. The NBA insists, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that fans want parity rather than dynasties; whatever profits came from those olden days is old money. Herb Simon may be 90 years old but he’s still alive, so his money’s new money and new money’s the money that talks. The only sport that’s never had a salary cap is MLB. The three that do, those paragons of fairness and enlightenment? All have significantly cut the players’ share of the revenue split after instituting a cap: since the NHL did in 2005, the players’ share is down from 57% to 50%; since the NBA’s cap in 1984, it’s 57% to 51%; the drop is steepest in the NFL, whose cap came in 1994 — 64% to 48% today.

NBA fans have always loved dynasties, whether rooting for them, against them or just marveling at the spectacle. We know adding a cap guarantees less money over time for the players. It doesn’t benefit the fans. It doesn’t benefit the players. It benefits those with the fuck-you money. Ballmer keeps testing the limits of whatever standards of credulity we still claim to cling to, even as Torre continues to overhand smash every weak defense the Clippers have lobbed. Ballmer’s obscenely wealthy, even among the obscenely wealthy. If anyone might wager his moneybin’s big enough to buy all the justice he needs, it’d be Ballmer. And the league would help him out. At least he hasn’t poured gas on the controversy by saying Magic Johnson having HIV means he’s no hero. Ballmer’s their boy.

James Dolan is not. So when a friend messaged me tonight “Did you hear about Pablo Torre looking into the Brunson contract?” . . . you know when theatres decorate with masks showing one laughing face and one crying? It me. When your team is finally legit for the first time since pre-9/11 yet their owner is channeling his inner Al Davis, often being the lone turd in his billionaire brothers’ punch bowl, you can’t help but laugh, and cry, and repeat.

When Ballmer took over in L.A., he succeeded an unholy and barely sentient amalgam of Theoden’s dementia (before Gandalf breaks the spell) and Donald Trump’s racism, sexism and aura of sleaze. Most importantly to the league, the Clippers were a trainwreck under Sterling for 30 years. Ballmer is the richest boss in the Association and the Clippers have posted 14 straight winning seasons, most of them 50-plus wins (or that pace during COVID-shortened seasons). Ballmer may violate the one thing the league insists is its competitive line in the sand, but he can simply build them a new beach, one with no cumbersome accountability to worry about. Look to your left. Look to your right. It’s happening all over.

I don’t know any Clippers fans — I don’t think I ever have. I suspect any rule-breaking and lying on Ballmer’s part means less to many of them than their team being a model of stability and success that finally has its own arena — the one hosting this year’s All-Star Game. There is this bizarre, vocal minority of usually younger Knick fans who’ve Stockholm Syndromed themselves into thinking Dolan is some unfairly targeted scapegoat, but I imagine a supermajority of Knick fans would not halt their stride if they heard Lucky Sperm Jim were in hot water.

But Brunson? I can’t go there. I can’t. I won’t. If it turns out Brunson worked with the Knicks to arrange some kind of off-the-books salary cap shenanigans, I’m done. I’m out. Maybe because it’s scummy. Maybe more for lying about it while accepting so much praise for lying about it. If they’re lying. Which maybe they’re not?

The most disappointing movie I’ve ever seen was House of 1000 Corpses. Spoiler: it is not an uplifting film. Spoiler II: it ends with a girl who’s been kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured all throughout finally escaping. She finds a road and is walking down it when she flags down a passing car. If I remember correctly it’s a cop? She tells him everything that happened to her, and her friends — all of whom are dead — and he tells her to get in. When she does, he drives her right back to the house. Turns out he’s in on it too. Fuck that. I can live without light. What I can’t live without is hope.

Jalen Brunson hasn’t just been the Knicks’ best player the past three years. He hasn’t just scored a lotta points or thrown some nice dimes. I don’t know if the Knicks will ever win it all with him leading the way. I’d love that, but I don’t need it. Brunson’s already done enough that I dreamed of seeing and feeling but never thought possible. Take his public face as the Knick captain.

Patrick Ewing had a mixed relationship with the public. Sometimes he could be aloof in interviews. He could sound — or be portrayed as having sounded — like he wanted to be both left alone and adored by the very same fans he didn’t seem to adore. I couldn’t stand when he’d be interviewed after losing to Chicago and insist every time that the Knicks were the better team. The first time, I was 13 and thought he was a prophet, ahead of his time. The next time he said it, I thought, “That’s leadership. He’s keeping them motivated.” Eventually, it can’t not sound like what it is: delusions. Could be a Georgetown thing; Alonzo Mourning lost to the Knicks three years straight and swore each time from the losing locker room that the Heat were the better team.

Carmelo Anthony was too cool for school, which is cool when you’re the scoring champ leading your team to its first only good year in over a decade. When that one year is the only good year you lead them to, the grace the fans and media extended starts to shrink. I do think athletes like Melo are easy to paint as selfishly caring about their personal interests more than the team’s needs, not because they’re inordinately selfish — how many of you honestly care more about your performance at work than everything else in your life? — but because there’s more money and more media than ever. We have a greater understanding of what athletes can indulge in and more coverage of that indulging.

Ewing and Anthony may or may not have been covered unfairly during their time in NY. The thing about Brunson is not only has that never come close to being true, it doesn’t even seem like it could. Him winning next year’s slam dunk contest would surprise me less than learning he agreed to an off-the-books end-around, that someone whose father made more than $5 million playing ball, who himself earned that much in Dallas before signing a $104 million deal with the Knicks, then extending for another $156 mil, whose seeming selflessness earned him all the praise and adulation and faith of a long-suffering fan base that’s collectively mentally ill after waiting so long through so much ugliness for a reason to hope . . . lied about it? All because the world and everything in it is still not enough?

Everything Brunson says and does suggests this is the guy. He’s Him. We cycled from one false messiah through another over the years before a miracle occurred. And yet if it turns out there’s fire where there’s smoke, it’s a bridge too far for me. I’ll thank the ‘bockers for all the memories and be on my way.

I used to be an NFL fan — Jets and Giants. I stopped following both around 2012. There was nowhere for me to turn as a fan and not feel gross. The owners would give their own mothers CTE if it meant higher profits. The media covering the sport grew increasingly docile and hands-off as they went from covering the league to partnering with it (Pablo Torre writes for The Athletic, not ESPN or NBC; if he worked for one of the NBA’s media partners, does this story ever see the light of day?). The players had bigger problems with the possibility of a gay teammate than one who beat and rapes women. Sayonara.

I’ve always thought I sensed something different about Brunson, an obvious and brilliant intelligence. Maybe I did. Maybe I projected what I wanted to see. Maybe he’s a slick actor; maybe he’s the real deal. But the NBA is supposed to be entertaining. It’s supposed to be a diversion from *gestures at a burning world*. It’s supposed to feel good, be fun.

Millions and millions and millions and millions of people within these borders are less safe than they used to be. Some are my family. My friends. My former students. The rapists and the racists and the eugencists are all having a moment while the money keeps funneling up and the pain keeps pouring down. At the heart of it is the same genocidal illogic that’d explain Brunson and Dolan, the son of a millionaire and the son of a billionaire, cheating — the only thing people who have it all long for is more.

In a time when more and more of us make do with less and less, I can’t write a possible Brunson scandal off as just “business as usual.” Business as usual is killing us all. I can’t deal with it killing the Knicks, my favorite escape, finally being good. Say it ain’t so, Jalen. C’mon, man.

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