The Mavericks might regret turning the cold shoulder on Jalen Brunson.
The Knicks superstar repeated on Wednesday that he not only wanted to stay in Dallas, but prior to the 2021-22 season, he tried to work out an extension with the Mavericks, but they weren’t as keen on the idea, which eventually led him to sign with New York during the next offseason.
It was similar to the sentiments Brunson expressed last March when he said he wanted to be in Dallas for the “long haul,” though this time the All-Star guard went into more detail about how the Mavericks sat on their hands as he declared he was ready to commit to the franchise.
“I really did want to stay in Dallas,” Brunson, 27, said on the “All The Smoke” podcast with Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes. “Before my fourth season in Dallas, my last season in Dallas, we try to extend our contract — whatever we can get. The most we can get is like four years and $55 million.
“And obviously we wanted to do that, I wanted to stay there and I thought I would be there for a long time. I liked my role there.”
Dallas still wanted Brunson, who was just emerging as a starter and had not yet blossomed into the All-Star he’d later become with the Knicks.
Brunson said the team wanted to wait until around the 20-25 game mark of the campaign to re-engage in talks.
The point guard thought he stepped up when Luka Doncic went down with an injury, and he posted 12 games with at least 17 points over the first 25 contests.
And when Brunson’s camp reached back out to the Mavericks at the point Dallas said it would discuss things again, the answer was still more of a wait-and-see regarding how he’d perform the rest of the season.
The Mavericks did eventually offer Brunson a deal to stay in Dallas around the trade deadline, but this time, Brunson shot down the idea because he thought he’d “outgrown” that deal.
After a thrilling run in the NBA playoffs that ended in a loss in the Western Conference Finals to the Warriors, then-owner Mark Cuban expressed a willingness to keep Brunson and that the team could “pay him more than anybody.”
“I think he wants to stay and that’s most important,” Cuban said in a Bally Sports Southwest interview in 2022. “I think, again, J-Kidd [head coach Jason Kidd] has a big part to play in that, I think J.B. blossomed as a player, as much as anybody on the squad, you know, from where he was last year to how far he came this year, is a tribute to Jalen and how hard he worked.”
But Brunson in this week’s podcast said when it came time to free agency, at least on his end of things, it was “crickets” and he personally never heard from Dallas.
That’s when he started to consider New York, and he eventually signed a four-year, $104 million contract to join the Knicks.
Brunson’s story contradicts the narrative Cuban has previously discussed about the guard’s free agent period.
Cuban, in part, blamed Brunson’s dad, Rick, for things going against the Mavericks.
Rick joined the Knicks as an assistant coach the same offseason his son signed in New York.
“Where it went south was when Rick took over, when the parent took over, or parents took over,” Cuban said last April.
He also insisted at the time that the Mavericks were not given the chance to offer more money, which Cuban said the team gladly would have paid.
“We didn’t know what the bid was,” Cuban added. “They never gave us a number. Knowing the numbers now, I would’ve paid it in a heartbeat, but he wouldn’t have come anyway. There’s just no possible way that it was about money.”
However it went down, Brunson has become one of the elite players in the NBA this season, averaging a career-high 27.6 points en route to his first All-Star Game.
In the end, he was not mad about how things turned out.
“Best move,” Brunson concluded about coming to New York.
