re: It looks like Jalen Brunson is signing with the NY Knicks

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In the winter of 2021, about a year after coming in to help his friend/partner Leon Rose run the Knicks, William "Worldwide Wes" Wesley was talking to an associate about the duo’s plans for the franchise.

"I told Brock," Wesley told the associate, referring to Brock Aller, a friend the Knicks had recently hired to serve as their chief strategist, "that the only way he and I would have an issue is if he didn’t have enough assets to draft D.J. Wagner by the time he entered the draft."

Wagner at the time was one of the country’s top sophomore prospects. More importantly, he was the son of Dajuan Wagner, the former NBA lottery pick whom Rose had represented as an agent.

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and there’s only one NBA family outside of the Wagners that Rose and Wesley consider their own. That would be the family of Rick Brunson, the former NBA point guard who also made his home in South Jersey and just happened to have been Rose’s first NBA client — and who the Knicks recently hired as an assistant coach.

Jalen, of course, is the son of Rick Brunson. He's also a former client of Rose’s and is currently represented by a group of CAA agents that includes Rose’s son, Sam. The contract can’t become official until Thursday at 6 p.m. ET, when the NBA’s free agency moratorium is lifted. But that’s just red tape. The deal is done.

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But there’s a more cynical way to read this, too. It was never said out loud, but when the Knicks handed the reins to a power agent and a power broker, it was understood by everyone around the team and the NBA that the main reason for doing it was so that they could one day recruit and attract shiny stars. You remember the names: Devin Booker, Karl-Anthony Towns, Damian Lillard.

Yet here we are, nearly three years later, and the Knicks are nowhere closer to contention, nowhere closer to relevance. They might as well be on a hamster wheel — and there’s no exit on the horizon.

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