Knicks' Jalen Brunson and Cavs' Donovan Mitchell were almost teammates, but now they're competitors
Cavaliers guard Donovan Mitchell defends Knicks guard Jalen Brunson in the first quarter during Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Credit: Newsday/William Perlman
He was the homegrown kid, the rising star who it was easy to imagine coming home to New York and carrying the Knicks to glory.
No, not Jalen Brunson, the overachieving son of a hard-working bench player of the last Knicks squad to reach the NBA Finals, who actually did pull off that feat. It was Donovan Mitchell, who was once looked at as the target to turn the Knicks' fortunes and the Knicks chased him hard.
The Knicks got Brunson as a free agent in 2022 and that same summer worked to pair him with Mitchell, making franchise-altering offers to the Utah Jazz before Cleveland swooped in and made the deal for Mitchell, leaving the Knicks spurned. The two players are now put in competition with each other to lead their teams with a what-if floating over them.
And as they started a face-off on the largest stage they’ve ever met on Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference Finals, it’s easy to imagine the competitive spirit has created another villain for the Garden fans to try to chase out of the city. But if the fans may want that or the media may paint that, they have a respect and a friendship that began before the planning ever began or their NBA fates were set.
“The utmost respect,” Brunson said Monday of his thoughts on Mitchell. “Got to know him since really my first year. We had mutual friends. The dude works really hard. Loves the game. I think he approaches it the right way so I have a lot of respect for him.”
The competition may have amplified on a stage far from New York in Game 1 of the 2022 playoff series between the Dallas Mavericks and Utah Jazz — with a contingent of Knicks executives seated in the front row in Dallas watching Mitchell score 32 points while Brunson, starting in place of an injured Luka Doncic, led Dallas with 24 points. It was only a short time later that the Knicks landed Brunson with a four-year, $104 million free-agent contract. And then they spent that summer negotiating with Utah, offering up combinations of the assortment of draft picks they’d compiled — eight first-rounders eligible to be dealt — and RJ Barrett.
The Knicks never hesitated as critics wondered about the size of the two guards, focused instead on the skills. But Utah shipped him to Cleveland for a haul highlighted by Lauri Markkanen and five first-round picks. In retrospect, that helped the Knicks assemble the team they have now, using Barrett as the centerpiece of a package that brought OG Anunoby to New York, the draft picks as part of the deals to acquire Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges.
It didn’t end the story as sleuths chased threads with Mitchell approaching free agency before he signed an extension in 2024. The connections were obvious. Mitchell grew up in Elmsford, just a long jumper away from the Knicks' training facility in Westchester County. His father, Donovan Sr., is a former minor-league baseball player who has worked for decades in the Mets organization, and Mitchell still openly roots for the Mets and heads home to attend games in the summer. He is represented by CAA, the agency that Knicks president Leon Rose ran before taking his current job.
The two met again in the playoffs in 2023 with the Knicks knocking the Cavs out in the opening round — with Brunson acknowledging before the start of that series that he had heard the rumors of them in the backcourt together.
“That’s all we heard all summer, to be honest with you," he said. "But I think wherever he’s gone — Utah and Cleveland — he’s made an impact. He has that type of presence.”
While playing with Team USA in 2023, Brunson told reporters, “It’s impossible not to see things — rumors and all the stuff that comes up on Twitter and all that stuff every single day is always on TV. There’s always possibilities when you hear about that stuff. Donovan is a good friend of mine for a while. We were in the same high school class, our relationship goes back a long way. I think right now, I’m more than happy with my guys, and I love my teammates.”
“Being a New Yorker playing in the Finals is just different,” Mitchell wrote in a diary he is doing for Andscape. “You don’t take it for granted. You grew up around it. You grew up a fan of it. And now to be an enemy in it is special, for sure. We played there a few years ago [in the playoffs] and we got whupped. The remaining core guys that are here remember that. So, we have to go out and be ready. It’s an amazing opportunity for us and for me being back home, but we got to go in there and take it.”
It has worked out fine for both of them. Brunson has become the captain of the Knicks, leading them to playoff berths in all four of his seasons in New York, starting with the first playoff series win in a decade and now reaching the conference finals for a second straight season.
Mitchell has had Cleveland in the playoffs every season and spearheaded the upset of the top-seeded Detroit Pistons to reach this series. While he has not been named captain on a team with a number of veteran leaders, it was Mitchell who clearly led them in Game 7 when he had 26 points and eight assists, averaging 28.1 points per game in the series.
“I hope Don knows this, I’ll follow him into war,” Jarrett Allen said after the Cavs advanced to this round. “I’ll trust every single decision that he makes, every single shot that he takes, every single word that he speaks in the locker room."
And when the team seemed ready to collapse after a one-sided loss in Game 6 with a chance to clinch the series against the Pistons at home, it was Mitchell who said, “Everything you want is on the other side of hard. Nothing good comes easy.”
It doesn’t sound that different from anything you’ve heard Brunson say, whether it is his mantra of “the magic is in the work,” or any of the humble words he’s spoken as the leader of the Knicks. Mitchell wore a Mets hat Tuesday morning and talked about sleeping in his own bed. Whatever transpires over this series, you can be certain that neither Brunson nor Mitchell will have a cross word to say about the other one, not even here on the biggest stage they’ve ever met on.
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
