I’m pretty sure Lowe was being sarcastic. Simmons overreacts to individual series and even games. Jaylen Brown deservedly won Finals MVP two years ago but that didn’t make him the best player on that team let alone the league.

I think it was 4th so ahead of Giannis and Luka.

2k bumped him from 93 to 96 in the playoffs lol.

He did and Lowe was calling him out for being reactionary lol

Who’s he above of Giannis. Luka. Jokic. Wemby. Shai?

I can get him to 6 but I don’t see how he is 5 at this point.

as a lifelong brunson hater he is definitely top 5 in the league right now. i would argue that you could even put him ahead of sga. sga struggled against the lakers and spurs when the gameplan was to limit his production. do the same thing on brunson and he wins you the finals in 5 games.

Brunson a winner at every level. He showed he was a team-first guy when he took the pay-cut, I’m not sure why anyone is gonna hold it against him for managing his way through the regular season and cranking up when there’s something real to play for.
Sample size of his time in New York is enough to know he is simply one of the best big-game players the league has seen, and he’s taken three of the four MVP trophies available this season.

how you have giannis on there and not jokic?

Jokic?

Luka loses points for durability at this point too, could also argue that Wemby isn’t at that level yet due to the issues he’s had in the clutch all season although that’s a harder case to make considering how dominant he was before the lack of conditioning started presenting itself.

sorry this might be my bias but rn i think jb is better than wemby. wemby obviously kills him on defense but jalen kills wemby on offense and availability honestly. dude had to be subbed out for a minute in the fourth quarter with <5 minutes left

Is SGA with a fair whistle better than Brunson? He didn’t know what to do when his flops weren’t working

shai is not better than brunson. shai was BEANS against the lakers and spurs. that’s a big reason why people thought spurs would win the title. that same defense could not contain brunson at all.

and i fucking hate brunson. he’s just better

If Giannis goes to a new team, he’s going to be revitalised and win MVP

I’m not even a Celtics fan, but it’s crazy how easily people forget about Jayson Tatum 

Theringer’s top100 has kawhi, ant, giannis, cade, Mitchell, jaylen brown, and curry ahead of JB. I think curry, ant, giannis, and kawhi still are ahead of JB.

Sorry but Jalen is better than Luka and Wemby right now. Jokic is better than JB but its just Jokic, Giannis, and SGA. That’s it. Jalen is Top 5 and should be looked at as the face of the league right now.

Jokic? I think he’s outside the top 5 rn

I love Zach Lowe and BS 🤷‍♂️

Brunson’s been cooking spida when it matters since the Dallas days

So was nico wrong to trade him 😱?

I took a quick look at some of the early 2000s MVP voting and OMG I think I found the answer. 35 year old PJ Brown received an MVP vote while playing for an 18-64 Hornets team. That’s insane.

Must have been someone throwing away a vote for the fuck if it, because it’s not like he was ass in all ways but one that got him noticed

There’s some fascinating (if you’re a huge nerd) stuff in the 2000s MVP voteshare data for sure.

Old enough to remember the controversy in 1999-2000 when Shaq got 120 of 121 first place votes, with Iverson getting the other one even though he finished 7th overall in voting. IIRC the guy who voted for Iverson said that he was more valuable to his team that Shaq was, which is…questionable lol. This would have been the first unanimous MVP ever, and with Curry in 2016 the second to date.

Some guys you wouldn’t expect to get MVP votes:

-John Stockton in 2001 at age 38 when he averaged 11 ppg

-Mike Bibby in 2002, averaged 14/5/3 that year

-Ben Wallace got a first place vote in 2004, the Pistons were incredible that year and it was the only time in 2002-06 he didn’t win DPOY (finished second in ‘04 to, of all people, Metta World Peace. Probably why Wallace was so mad a few months later when he shoved MWP to initiate the Malice in the Palace)

-As others have noted PJ Brown got a vote on an 18-win 2005 Hornets team where he averaged 11/9/2 and did not attempt a 3 pointer all year, nor did he receive DPOY votes or make an all-defense team

-Shawn Marion (deservedly!) received a vote both years Steve Nash won (2005 and 2006), I wonder how many instances there have been where teammates both received votes with one winning?

-Shaq got multiple votes in 2007 for Miami despite playing less than 29 mpg

By the late 2000’s the league tightened up its voting policies and there aren’t really any egregious choices after that it seems.

I think I found the most ridiculous one though: in 1998-99 (50 game lockout season), Mark Jackson, yes that Mark Jackson, got an MVP vote for a Pacers team that finished 3rd in the East with 53 wins (adjusted), recording season averages of 8 pts, 4 rebs and 8 assists in 28 mins per game

Deivi Cruz

holy shit my man you are pulling some sports history right here

If you go back to the 70s, the players made some absolutely insane votes. Truck Robinson in his sophomore year got an MVP vote with an 11.2 ppg/6.8 rpg/1.4 apg season with just under 2 stocks a game, and Clyde Lee got a vote with a 5.⁹⁄₁₁.¹⁄₁.3 season, under 1 stock in 1973-74.

Maybe not the worst but 2021 DRose getting a first place MVP vote from fan voting is always a funny piece of trivia. Only played for NY for 35 games and started 3

While he wasn’t as bad relief pitcher Ryan Tepera got an mvp vote because a voter accidentally chose him back in 2020.

same here and Rasheed was my fave player growing up. i have an orange Rasheed Wallace Knicks shirsey from 2013 that i almost had to debut this past weekend.

I do feel like that is underselling Brunson and KAT. They are both stars. KAT may have been finals MVP without the foul trouble (undeserved fouls in my opinion, but I digress). Brunson is a star. On his worst shooting night he had 5 steals. He put the team on his back when it really mattered. He probably has the best footwork in the league and a ridiculously deep bag.

without any standouts

Listen I understand your sentiment and agree that the roster is very balanced but lets not get crazy here, JB is very much a standout

Maybe it was just spin but I really reframed my opinion of the inconsistency when I saw one of Mike Brown’s post-game interviews where he said they 100% used the regular season to intensely trial a bunch of different things and opened it up to player collaboration (making changes when someone said “I hate this” “This isn’t working, can we try X” almost like giving em veto power). He basically owned it straight up that not only were they inconsistent, they also had a good amount of conflict/locker room tension as a result of this approach, but that there was basically no other way to find the exact configurations of what worked. It seems like a gamble that massively paid off not least of all bc it created a open environment in which anyone can bring Brown an idea and have it seriously considered.

Anyway sry to rant you may have already seen the clip. I think def playoff run was a lot of things coming together and peaking at the right time. But Mike Brown’s comments make me think that there’s a good chance that the 2025-2026 regular season was getting kinks out and we have strong potential to come back next year and translate a lot of qualities of that playoff run into consistency.

This and he had the 7th most points in the league this year. This is to say that Brunsen is arguably a top 10 player. Just because the voters didn’t think he’s number 1 doesn’t mean he isn’t the clear best player on the Knicks.

Brunsen was clearly the guy for the Knicks. You know that because the Spurs clearly focused on him defensively and he still put up 45 in the close out game.

Him not getting MVP votes is him getting MVP votes. Functionally.

Real ones know. I’m not saying they know anything, but have you seen the compilations of supposed NBA insiders deriding the Knicks choice to bring in Brunson? Everyone was shitting on him and the organization and calling into question the move. Becky Hammon famously said that Brunson wasn’t the 1a dude and that he was too small.

what made Linsanity so refreshing was the idea that a Knick team could play team basketball again. We were all so sick of Melo dribbling out the shot clock and taking some ridiculous turnaround fadeaway jumper while the rest of the team just stood around and watched. Brunson at his worst this year was playing Melo ball. Credit to Mike Brown and KAT for coming up with a plan to get Brunson off ball and turn the season around - big assist to Rick Brunson for giving Jalen the Belt when he fell back into bad habits during Game 4 of Atlanta Series.

Lin is a weirdly good analogy to Brunson. 

Both unassuming. Both big winners in high school and in college. Lin was top California State basketball player. #1 in California and yet got zero offers for college. 

They were doubted and outperformed. Blew up in NY. 

Celtics flair “Brady” telling the world how a Knicks fan should feel is the definition of nonsensical.

Absolutely this. This years voting was really just about who you put fifth, and I think Brunson would have been an OK option to choose as fifth (IMHO better than Kawhi and Mitchell), but if you’re honest and don’t let your views be clouded by recency and an insane playoff run, Brunson did not have a better regular season than Brown and Cade.

I think those guys making up a “clear top 4” in your head is the exact result of the echo chamber ops talking about. 

You get 5 votes though. Makes no sense for Brunson not to get a single vote when Donovan Mitchell got a vote and finished below Brunson

one of the non discussed lopsided trades is houston trading hayes for jack marin and peanuts.  hayes didnt get along with tex winter so he got shipped .  unfortunate since hayes was a houston cougar star before going to the houston rockets

Uhhh… most mavericks fans were quite annoyed by it. He absolutely crushed the first round of the playoffs by himself without Luka. And before that everyone thought \(55M was a slight overpay but nothing crippling. Many thought Cuban and Niko were idiots for how they handled Brunson because it was no secret he'd go play for his dad in NY if he didn't get signed with the Mavs. Niko and Cuban with the double generational fumble. I only hate watch the mavs now even after standing with them after trading Nash over 20 years ago. They made me more of a fan of players, though - a suns fan, a lakers fan, and a Knick's fan. Double fuck those guys cause I lived in Brooklyn, and the nets support the shit out of the community while Dolan just exploits it to get \)$$.

I wanted it to be wemby

They also said who had insane seasons. Brunson’s regular season was in no way insane. They were all clearly better than Brunson at least until it was the playoffs when it was time to be better than Brunson

If we were giving a post season MVP award, Brunson certainly would deserve it! For the regular season from both a stats and a winning perspective he was worse than most of the players who got votes.

Idk why Knicks fans are mad about this. I literally gave him a compliment and said that ultimately he won a chip so who cares and yet it’s not enough

The only team to win less regular season games than the Knicks did this year and win a chip in the last 25 years in the 06 Heat team.

In the last 2 years (which has been pretty much the same team bar towns), they underperform in the regular season relative to their play off performance. They finished 3 both years in the east and got to a conference finals one year and won the chip the next.

Idk how this can be debated

Regular season: 3rd seed in the east, 6th in the nba
Play offs: 1st seed in the east, 1st in the nba

You’re not gonna beat the Hawks. Okay, but you’re not gonna beat the Sixers. Okay, but you’re not gonna beat the Cavs. Okay, but you’re not gonna win the title. Okay, but you’re not gonna repeat.

he’s pretty clearly talking about regular season, where the Knicks would be tied 6th in total wins