How Jalen Brunson's mother helped mold the Knicks point guard into an All-Star

It started in high school with handwritten notes.

Jalen Brunson would find them taped to the bathroom mirror or stuck to the fridge or slipped into a jacket pocket. Before every game, Sandra Brunson would send her son a message, something crafted to push or challenge him before he went on the court. Later, when Jalen took his game to Villanova and then the NBA, Sandra took her game high tech.

About three hours before every tipoff — including his first All-Star appearance this Sunday in Indianapolis — the Knicks point guard can count on receiving some sort of inspirational text from his mother.

The magic is in the work.

When people make it about you, you make it about your team.

Remember, you’re not supposed to be here.

That last one remains a Brunson family favorite as Jalen has gone from a second-round draft pick who didn’t start until his fourth season in the NBA to an All-Star who has pulled off the seemingly impossible feat of turning the Knicks into a legitimate contender.

“I just send a little something to think about," Sandra, who grew up in Lakeview on Long Island, told Newsday. “I can count on my two hands the number of times I’ve missed sending him a text.”

Most Knicks fans are familiar with Brunson’s father, Rick, who played nine seasons in the NBA, including three with the Knicks, and now is an assistant coach with the team. While Rick’s contributions to his son’s career have been well-documented, Sandra, a 5-10 former volleyball player at Temple, has played a lesser-known co-starring role in molding their son into the elite player and leader that he is.

“It’s been a family commitment and to see it, it’s special,” said Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau, who has known Jalen since he was a preschooler.

A toddler in the locker room

The daughter of Jamaican immigrants, Sandra was born on Long Island and earned a volleyball scholarship to Temple University after graduating from Malverne High School. At Temple, she roomed with Kobe Bryant’s older sister, Sharia. She also met and later married Rick, a star guard who learned his craft under legendary coach John Chaney.

Life in the NBA can be tough on families as players bounce from team to team. Sandra said their family, which also includes Jalen’s younger sister, Erica, moved “nine to 10” times over the course of her husband’s playing and coaching career. The one constant in all of this was Long Island, where Sandra’s parents, Sankey and Judith Davis, owned a house until recently retiring to Florida.

No one can say for sure, but it may have been on a Little Tikes hoop in his grandparents’ house where the toddler Jalen made his first basket. Rick, undrafted out of Temple, went to Australia to start his basketball career and Sandra, who had recently given birth to Jalen, moved in with her parents in Lakeview. 

After stints in the CBA and the Portland Trail Blazers, Rick was signed by the Knicks at the start of the lockout-shortened 1999 season when Jalen was almost 3 years old. For the next three seasons, the family would live in both White Plains and Lakeview. Jalen spent so much time around the Knicks that it seemed Madison Square Garden was his preschool.

“I used to tell Rick this kid thinks he’s an NBA player. We need to get him into Kindercare or something,” Sandra remembered with a laugh.

Before he could read a book, Jalen could read the moves of his father’s teammates, and he often would entertain the locker room with impressions of the Knicks’ top players. He did Larry Johnson’s "Big L." Patrick Ewing’s turnaround jumper. Latrell Sprewell’s dunk and scowl.

“It’s surreal. I think back to when he was a kid coming here in the '90s and you never know,” said Thibodeau, who was an assistant on those teams. “He was funny and he was entertaining and he made everyone laugh. But he was so serious, even back then. He had it spot on. He was like 6 and he had all their moves down.”

Ewing joked that if he had any idea that the pesky kid running around the Knicks' locker room was going to blossom into a star, he would have started recruiting him to Georgetown back then.

“He wouldn’t leave my locker. He was always at my locker,” Ewing told Newsday during last year’s playoffs. “Then that kid kicked my butt when I was [a coach] at Georgetown and he has done a good job of improving his game every day. I love the type of player he is. His mom and dad did an outstanding job raising him.”

One-on-one in the sun

No one could have predicted that the kid hanging out in the Knicks' locker room at the turn of the century would one day resurface as the most important leader the franchise has seen since Ewing.

Brunson doesn’t look or act the part of a superstar. At 6-2, he’s short for his profession, he can barely dunk and is more comfortable talking about the contributions of his teammates than calling attention to himself.

Yet heading into the All-Star break, Brunson is seventh in the NBA in scoring with a career-high average of 27.6 points. He has scored 40 or more five times in the 52 games he has played. He has gone for 30-plus 22 times. Most important, he has the Knicks in fourth place in the Eastern Conference, despite the fact they are playing without three starters, including fellow All-Star Julius Randle.

Jalen Brunson in 2023-24

Games: 52

Points per game: 27.6

Assists per game: 6.5

Rebounds per game: 3.8

Field goal percentage: 48.3%

Three-point percentage: 41.1%

*-through Feb. 14, 2024

Knicks teammate Josh Hart, who also played with Brunson at Villanova, said it all comes down to hard work.

“He’s put in the work for a long time,” Hart said. “When your All-Star and your leader does it, it sets the standard . . . We all take pride in that.”

Sandra said the family didn’t necessarily push Jalen to play basketball. They tried him in soccer. They tried him in baseball. They had him in swimming because she thought it would be cool if he was a lifeguard. Nothing, of course, could compete with what Jalen saw in the NBA.

As the son of two athletes, Jalen learned early on that the one thing he could control was how much work he put into achieving his goals. Rick did some early grooming with his son, encouraging him as a preschooler to shoot with his left hand. Today, while Jalen writes and eats with his right hand, he shoots with his left, making him harder to guard.

The father-son workouts took a serious turn when Jalen was a pre-teen and Rick retired from playing to take a job as an assistant at the University of Virginia. The two would train in the hot sun, while Sandra taped the session so they could review it later.

“I’m like, do I really need to stand here in the hot sun with this tripod and camera,” Sandra said. “I see those tapes now and they are so funny.”

Funny enough that when a tape of a workout was found by X account @NBA_New York and posted, it went viral and to date has received 5.9 million views. The tape features a depleted-looking Jalen slogging his way through a workout while Rick yells at him, “Tired is for the weak.”

Jalen, who reposted the video on X, joked with reporters that watching it gave him “PTSD,” adding that he always wanted to be pushed but would have preferred that it happened in an air-conditioned gym.

Sandra, who Jalen has referred to as “my best friend," sometimes had to act as a buffer between the two. Yet she also did her fair share of pushing.

It was Sandra who pushed her son off the court, insisting when the family moved to Chicago that he enroll at Stevenson High, one of the top academic schools in Illinois, despite the fact they didn’t have a highly-regarded basketball program. It was Sandra who taught him to make a list of his goals at the start of each season and tape them to the wall in his bedroom where he could see them every morning. And it was Sandra who pushed him to graduate from Villanova in three years when he made it clear he might want to leave school early for the NBA.

“The best-kept secret in college is summer school,” she said. “I told him, ‘Don’t sit there, twiddle your thumbs, play video games and go to the gym.’ ”

The family continued to preach the mantra of hard work after the Dallas Mavericks took Jalen with the third pick in the second round (33rd overall) of the 2018 NBA Draft. Rather than bemoan the fact he hadn’t gone earlier, Sandra said the family embraced it.

Brunson’s charity is named the Second Round Foundation. Sandra, who is on the board, said its main purpose is to help others, particularly young people, who have been overlooked and underestimated.

Worth every penny

More than a few thought the Knicks were overpaying when they handed Brunson a four-year, $104 million contract during free agency in the summer of 2022. The whole deal seemed just a little too incestuous given that Knicks president Leon Rose was Brunson’s godfather, Thibodeau had known the family for years and Rick had recently been hired as an assistant coach.

Yet anyone who saw the emotional game when Brunson scored 40 points against Indiana two weeks ago after being named an All-Star reserve has to admit that it all worked out beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

After years of preaching to their son the benefits of hard work, Sandra is learning to relax and enjoy herself. She loves seeing her husband on the Knicks' bench with her son. She makes an effort to keep up with everything that is being said about the team, especially on SiriusXM NBA Radio’s "The Starting Lineup" show, which has had her on as a guest.

The entire family is headed to Indianapolis for the All-Star Game, and Sandra has been thinking about what sort of text she might send Jalen before Sunday night's game. Perhaps, this one time, the theme won’t have something to do with work.

Said Sandra: “I gotta stop and enjoy the moment. My son is about to accomplish something that is on his list of things to do . . . I hope that he has time to pinch himself.”

By Barbara Barker

barbara.barker@newsday.commeanbarb

Barbara Barker is an award-winning columnist and features writer in the sports department at Newsday. She has covered sports in New York for more than 20 years.