Let me count the ways...

Our love affair with Jalen Brunson has reached a new crescendo.

How does one measure greatness?

Much like measuring true love, there are no shortage of ways…

You can measure it by how other greats respond, like when the winningest coach in NBA history has run out of ways to slow you down.

You can measure it in the greatness it inspires, like when Victor Wembanyama, who will own this league for as long as his body allows, needed to summon the first legendary performance of his young career to get his team a win (with some help from the refs, of course).

You can measure it in words, which Hall of Famer Mike Breen had seemingly run out of by the end of the night to describe what he was seeing.

You can measure by in a picture, which is worth a thousand words.

And of course, you can measure greatness by the company it keeps, which is where we’ll start today.

No one joins the 60-point club by accident. 50? Sure. You can make a Top 15 list of the “worst” NBA players to score 50 in a game.

But 60? That’s invite only.

It may not be as rare an achievement as it once was, with nearly half of the non-Wilt 60-point games occurring in the last decade. Nonetheless, there are no impostors in this inner circle.

Before yesterday, the only man who achieved the feat with less than three All-Star games on his resume was also the first to ever do it. That would be Hall-of-Famer and two-time All-Star Joe Fulks, who led the league in scoring in its first season of existence as a 25-year-old rookie

And even he, like everyone else with a 60-piece on their resume, has at least one All-NBA birth on their resume. Jalen Brunson will join that club in a few months.

It’s one of many exclusive clubs he’s butting his way into these days…one of top five scoring years in Knick history, one of top five scorers in the NBA this season, and if the voters have the good sense that continues to elude some pundits, top five in MVP.

Brunson’s name is on those lists because he is as unstoppable a superstar as he is an unlikely one.

This is a sport in which greatness comes in big packages, not small ones. Wemby is the biggest we’ve seen, with this skill level, maybe ever, and it is why so many predict such great things in his future. Until a few years ago, Chamberlain had half of the 60-point games in NBA history. That skill at that size gave him the same unfair advantage Wembanyama has now.

Jalen is not so lucky. The only player to score 60 who was shorter than Brunson’s listed 6'2" is the man he replaced as New York’s starting point guard, Kemba Walker.

But being vertically impaired is far from the only challenge Jalen has had to overcome. His greatest hurdle - perception - is one he is still navigating on a daily basis.

Even Walker was selected within the first 10 picks of the NBA draft, like nearly every other player in the 60-point club. Talent evaluators uniformly recognized their gifts for what they were.

Brunson, on the other hand, was drafted 33rd overall - later than any other player in the modern era who went on to score 60¹, joining Gilbert Arenas as the only players to do so without having been a top-15 pick.

Underestimation has become a necessary part of his story. Perhaps the defining part of his story, with no signs of letting up. How else, after all, can we explain him becoming only the third man to score 60 and not get to the free throw line at least 10 times in the same game?

(The other two: Steph Curry, who took six free throws and attempted a career-high 23 3-pointers when he scored 60 against the Hawks in February, and Rick Barry, who took five when he put 64 on the Blazers almost exactly 50 years ago. Barry, we should note, was notoriously unpopular around the league. Perhaps that unpopularity included the refs as well.)

Stars get calls. Jalen Brunson gets the shaft.

That the refereeing overshadowed what was an otherwise classic game is far more unfortunate than the fact that the Knicks came up short, even in the midst of a playoff race. Losses happen, even amidst individual performances of this magnitude. Michael, Wilt, Steph, and of course, our own Bernard King…all had the misfortune of putting up 60 in a defeat at some point in their careers. It’s the one club Jalen surely wishes he weren’t a part of.

And that, more than anything, is the greatest measure of the greatness of this player, who is only beginning to write his New York story.

More than 61 points, more than any awards or accolades he’ll receive, more than the record books he’ll increasingly find himself a part of, Jalen Brunson’s exploits are already the stuff of legend because he only cares about one thing:

Winning.

There was no better proof of that than on the final play of regulation, when Jalen, like he did on virtually every possession of this game, took what the defense gave him:

The shot missed, but it was the right play. Not exactly surprising, because how often does he make the wrong one?

For all the points he scores from the point guard position, it’s telling how Brunson never gets labeled a ball hog or selfish. Only his former teammate Luka Doncic has scored at a higher clip since Julius went down, but that has been out of necessity, not self-interest.

Maybe instead of Brunson Burner, Brunson Buoy is a more appropriate moniker, because he is the only thing keeping them afloat.

It wasn’t enough last night, but that shouldn’t mar an unforgettable performance. Mike Breen said it best: he’s the type of player that made us fall in love with basketball.

The “us” was Mike and his longtime broadcast partner, Walt “Clyde” Frazier, who turned 79 years old yesterday. The greatest point guard in Knicks history and one of the best to ever do it knows a thing or two about special performances, so it was only fitting he was on hand to see this one in person.

It was a night that neither he nor anyone who witnessed it will soon forget.

Greatness, by any name, and by any metric.

Let me count the ways.

🏀

1. The only player ever drafted later to score 60: George Gervin, who had already played two years in the ABA and didn’t seem intent on coming to the NBA, which is why no team wanted to spend a high pick on his services.