Shams: Jalen Brunson will sign $110M deal with the Knicks

If you’re anything like me, the fact that Mark Cuban’s Dallas Mavericks and Pat Riley’s Miami Heat were mentioned as the two teams Jalen Brunson would meet with in free agency along with the New York Knicks, you expected the worst. Open your eyes, child. Let the sunshine in.

Let’s digest this one slowly and mindfully.

Some nudnik is gonna try to tell you the Knicks overpaid for Brunson. Not true. $27.5M a year sounds like a lot of money, but remember the salary cap is going to continue to rise. Even now, at that salary, Brunson is somewhere around the 14th-highest paid point guard in the NBA. That’s mid money for better-than-mid production. That works.

With their biggest offseason target achieved, the Knicks are now free to get moving on other moves. It sounds like they’re confident they can re-sign Mitchell Robinson. They seem interested in back-up bigs who can shoot from the perimeter, like Thomas Bryant and Isaiah Hartenstein. The haters said the Knicks would lose out on Brunson and be left with egg on their face and money burning a hole in their pocket. So far from draft night to the Brunson signing, it looks a lot more like intelligent design.

Also, major kudos to the Knicks for landing their man without the incumbent team even getting a chance to talk with him. Doesn’t that sound like something that usually happens to the Knicks? They can’t get a meeting with this free agent; they’re not a real candidate for that free agent. This time, the only team Brunson’s ever played for, the one that just reached the Western conference finals, couldn’t even get a meeting with him. Between Brunson signing, Cuban dismissed and Kevin Durant asking for a trade, this is the best Knick offseason day in quite a while. Soak it up, babes.