Most athletes, when they tell you that no one believed in them, are lying. It is a lie more for themselves than anyone else, the mechanical rabbit they’ve invented to chase, the demon that drives them given some imaginary personification of doubters they have proven wrong and triumphantly overcome. Michael Jordan was most famous for this — he once scored 50-plus points on a poor schmuck named LaBradford Smith he claimed had insulted him, a story Jordan made up out of whole cloth just so he’d have motivation to win that night — but it is fundamental to every athlete’s self-mythos. No one wants to admit that they are the best player in the world because they have been blessed by the gods with height, perfect eyesight, ideal muscular foundation or simply talent bestowed upon them at birth by genealogical good fortune, something that has been plainly obvious to anyone who has ever met them since they were a very small child. So, they make up doubters, skeptics—haters. It makes the athlete push harder. It makes them better. But it does not make this lie any more true.

The beauty of Jalen Brunson is that this is not a lie. Brunson really has been doubted his entire career. Coming out of Villanova—where he had won two NCAA championships—he wasn’t drafted until the second round, behind Elie Okobo, Dzanan Mussa and Chandler Hutchison; most draft recaps written at the time don’t even mention him. The team that drafted him, the Dallas Mavericks, considered him a backup to Dennis Smith Jr.; he would not even start the majority of the games he played for the Mavericks until his fourth season. Dallas eventually let him leave in free agency, thinking him expendable for a team that was building around Luka Doncic (two years before they would trade Doncic). When the Knicks signed Brunson, it was considered by most NBA observers as a wild overpay and perhaps even a favor to his dad, a former Knick. Brunson has always been seen as too small at 6-foot-2, too slow, too much of a combo guard, too limited defensively, just too different from what NBA coaches, staffs and even opponents were looking for or wanted. This held true as late as these very playoffs, when........

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