What He Said First

The greatest comeback in NBA history at 30,000 feet, and the stuff that matters after the buzzer.

The flight home from DC was brutal. One day turn, up at 4:30 am, delayed two and a half hours, then stuck on the runway another 2. I was smoked, but I had Game 4 of the NBA Finals pulled up on my iPad, airpods in, and wondered how the Knicks could make my travel home any more depressing.

The Knicks were down 29.

Now I’m not necessarily a Knicks fan. My son Park is a BIG NBA fan, but we cheer for the Mavs in our house per their mom’s Texas roots. But this post-season I’m really enjoyed catching Jalen and the boys on this historic run. An yet, this game (and the series) had a feeling of dread creeping over it. Knicks up 2, then lose at the Garden, then about to be tied up in the series heading back to San Antonio. Not the script New York wants written. You know the feeling. Another year, another almost. I kept the game on mostly out of boredom.

Then it started.

A three that rolled around the rim and somehow dropped. Then another. Then Brunson, who’d gone scoreless the entire first quarter, hitting from everywhere. The lead went from 29 to 20 to single digits, and somewhere over Pennsylvania I caught myself leaning into a iPad like it could hear me.

OG Anunoby tipped in a miss with 1.2 seconds left. We had jsut stood up to disembark. 107 to 106. The largest comeback in the history of the NBA Finals. New York, one win from its first title since 1973.

I let out an audible gasp. The man next to me asked if I was alright.

A comeback like that isn’t built on one miracle, though. It’s built on a hundred small, unglamorous decisions to play the possession in front of you while the scoreboard begs you to quit. You do the next right thing, and then the next one, until the lead you couldn’t imagine touching is suddenly gone.

That alone would have made the night.

But it was the press conference after that got me.

Jalen Brunson sat down after the greatest professional win of his life. The city was already pouring into the streets with his name on it. And before a single question about the game, before one word about the comeback or the potential title or himself, he asked to make a statement.

“Real quick, before we get started.” (Please take 1:28 to watch this).

It was about a boy named Jonathan.

A kid from North Carolina with a serious heart condition. Make-A-Wish had asked Brunson to record him a video. Instead, he picked up the phone and FaceTimed him, just to talk. A short call, he said. Earlier in the week. Well worth it.

He had gotten the news that day that Jonathan didn’t make it.

So the first thing the world heard from Jalen Brunson, on the biggest night of his career, was a child’s name and a prayer. May God rest his soul. Then he stopped to collect himself.

Infuriatingly, the room did not pause with him. Before he had fully gathered himself, an ass-hat reporter leaned into a microphone and went straight to basketball. Just rolled right past it. Brunson could only manage one word. Sorry. He sat there, a man who had just honored a dead child first on the biggest individual sports performance of his life, and apologized for needing a second.

I wanted to reach through the screen and throat-punch that guy.

Then the questions kept coming, and they were small and bad, like most questions about sports from people who cover them (poorly). “What were you thinking at halftime. How do you climb out of a hole like that.” The kind of thing you ask when the only frame you own is the scoreboard. Here was a man with eternity on his mind, and the room wanted to know about adjustments.

But he answered them. All of them. With more grace than the room deserved.

“We chipped away,” he said. One possession at a time. Hit singles, get on base, make a play from there. He talked about belief, about a locker room that actually thought it could happen when the math said otherwise. When someone asked him how on earth it happened, he gave them a single word. Believe. And more than once he came back to how lucky they were to even be in this position, with everything still in front of them and nothing yet to celebrate.

At one point, he said,

“You’re allowed to think about the worst possible scenario. But then you have to go do something about it.”

And the doing is never grand. When you’re down 29, no single play saves you. There is only the next possession, and then the one after that. A stop. A rebound. One good pass. You don’t erase the deficit, you chip at it, one unglamorous thing at a time, and you refuse to quit while you do it.

Grief works the same way. So does building anything that lasts. You don’t fix the whole of it in one swing. You get the next call, the next hard conversation, the next small thing that’s actually in your hands. The worst case scenario is allowed to live in your head at times. It just doesn’t get to set the terms.

Brunson knew the worst case that morning. He had held it on a phone call with a boy who didn’t make it. And he still walked into the building and played the possession in front of him, a hundred times over, until the impossible number was gone.

Brunson had a championship in view and led with a kid he met once, on a phone call.

The comeback was the greatest I’ve ever seen.

The press conference was better.

-ap