Jalen Brunson was the Knicks’ captain long before it was official

You earn the all-lowercase version of the word before anyone gets around to capitalizing the first letter. That’s when you know you have a genuine captain. Willis Reed, who probably carried the title as well and as proudly as any New York athlete ever has, wasn’t officially named Captain of the Knicks until Sept. 21, 1967. 

But he’d been their captain without debate far longer. 

“Willis was the captain and the leader,” Bill Bradley once wrote. “The role seemed natural for him and he was respected by everyone. He was always the one to speak up when Red [Holzman] asked if anyone had anything to add.” 

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Or as Clyde Frazier put it as recently as last winter: “You know someone is the captain when you can’t imagine anyone else in that role besides him.” 

Funny, too. Clyde actually was a Knicks captain, his last three years on the Knicks, after Reed’s knees finally forced him to retire. And yet even Frazier understood: when he was in the same room with Willis, only one of them would ever be called “Captain.” 

Jalen Brunson has been the captain of the Knicks from the second he signed his name at the bottom of his contract 25 months ago. He’s been their captain in the gym — first in, last out — and on the court, where he led them to back-to-back playoff berths for the first time in 23 years. He is Tom Thibodeau’s eyes, ears and voice on the court. 

“A born leader,” Thibodeau says. 

So there will be a sweet formal introduction Thursday afternoon, and Brunson will officially become the Knicks’ Captain, capital C, and all you have to do to recognize the difference between captain and Captain is ask yourself a simple trivia question: who was the last Knicks captain? 

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(I will give you a minute to fire up the Google machine …) 

Yep. It was Lance Thomas, from 2017 until 2019, a two-year stretch in which the Knicks went 46-118. All due respect to Thomas, a very nice man and a good enough player to log nine seasons in the league. But it’s hard to lead from the bench, which is where Thomas spent most of his 199 active games as captain, averaging a tick over 18 minutes a game. 

So it is Brunson who will wear the captain’s “C”, even if the NBA doesn’t usually slap an actual letter on an actual chest. Hockey does, of course, and that’s one of the sport’s endearing and enduring traditions. If you squint hard enough, you can see a “C” on the helmets of the various captains in the NFL. Baseball has long shied away from that, a glaring exception being the oversized “C” that Keith Hernandez wore his final few years with the Mets. (John Franco had the same unfortunate wardrobe choice a few years later).

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But Hernandez was like Brunson. He started captaining the Mets the moment he landed in Montreal, a few days after being traded to them from the Cardinals in 1983, and did most of his best work as a captain before he was named the Mets’ official Captain on May 6, 1987. 

From 1939 until 1976, the Yankees never designated a Captain out of respect to Lou Gehrig, since it was Joe McCarthy’s wish that the position be retired along with the man and his No. 4. But George Steinbrenner correctly believed Thurman Munson was the team’s clear leader by then and sought to have him named Captain. 

https://x.com/joshhart/status/1820828231743701327

Thanks to that, we had Don Mattingly. And then Derek Jeter. 

And now Aaron Judge, who is 1A to Brunson’s 1B among New York’s sports icons at the moment, bringing exactly the same qualities to the job: excellence in the arena, unquestioned leadership and respect out of it. He, too, was a captain before he was a Captain. 

Brunson will join him Thursday. His running mate and podcast partner Josh Hart posted a picture of himself officially saluting his longtime friend, and that was nice, even if you absolutely know it was followed by the sharpest possible needle of a chop-busting text message from No. 3 to No. 11. 

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And maybe you half expected Hart to follow that with a quote the two of them surely learned in their English lit classes back at Villanova: 

O Captain! My Captain! Rise up and hear the bells … 

Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills …