Almost as soon as the league punished the Clippers on Wednesday, Jalen Brunson's name started showing up next to Kawhi Leonard's.
The argument goes that the New York Knicks star took less than he could have in 2024 while his father Rick sat on the coaching staff, so the Knicks must have had their own quiet way around the cap.
The comparison falls apart once anyone reads what the league found.
The NBA's Sept. 2 release said the Clippers set up off-court income for Leonard with four companies that did business with the team, paid his personal expenses, and never reported the outside income requests his then-business manager Dennis Robertson made for him.
The bill came to five first-round picks, a $30 million fine, a one year suspension for owner Steve Ballmer and $700,000 from Leonard.
Brunson's deal ran the other way, as he agreed to a four-year, $156.5 million extension on July 12, 2024, with a player option on the final season, instead of waiting a year for a five-year deal worth about $269 million as a free agent.
The roster his discount kept together went 53-29 last season and beat the Spurs in five games in the Finals with Brunson as Finals MVP.
SNY's Ian Begley pushed back on the Brunson talk Friday in a post on X.
"Brunson signed his max extension with the intent to give Knicks more financial flexibility and he will be paid handsomely when he signs his next max extension with NY," Begley wrote.
He added that next to the max deal Brunson could have signed as a free agent, he left $37 million on the table, and that Leonard, per the league's report, received money outside of normal salary cap payments on his first Clippers contract.
The difference is that a player who takes less money is doing something the rules allow, because it is his money to leave behind, while a team that arranges outside income so a player collects more than his contract says is hiding real pay from the other 29 teams.
The league did look at the Knicks once, checking on Rick Brunson's 2024 promotion to associate head coach, and Begley reported that December that the case had closed after the team said Rick took the departed Johnnie Bryant's job at Bryant's salary.
Brunson's discount is the model every contender wishes it had, which is why the next round of star extensions in New York comes down to what each player does with his own money.
Brunson averaged 26.0 points and 6.8 assists last season and had left wrist surgery in July that The Athletic's James L. Edwards III reported was not expected to linger into training camp, which opens Sept. 29.
He spent the summer talking about the mindset of trying to repeat and turning down the King of New York label , a strange profile for a player supposedly hiding a payment.
His next contract will be a real max, and nobody should call it a payback, because paying market price to a Finals MVP is the least suspicious thing a team can do.
