Jalen Brunson is the toast of New York after the 6-foot-2 point guard personally willed the New York Knicks to the NBA title on Saturday with a 45-point performance. The rest of his team scored 49. But there is one reason for New Yorkers to wince about the basketball star known for his clutch play and modesty: He is a mouthpiece for the donor class’s tax grievances—and the paper on Sixth Avenue is already recruiting him for its donor-class crusade.
After the Knicks defeated the San Antonio Spurs in Texas on Saturday, clinching the championship series four games to one, a reporter asked Mr. Brunson what he had against Texas. He dropped the four syllables that send the ownership class into a hunger strike—said he missed the Texas taxes—and every sports page in the country dutifully treated a throwaway line as a jeremiad against the public sector that pays his paycheck.
The NBA’s Dallas Mavericks let the point guard sign with the New York team in free agency in 2022. It was a loss for Texas and a gain for New York, and it meant Mr. Brunson now contributes to the state whose fans pack his arena, whose roads carry his bus, whose schools educate the children of the people who clean the arena after he goes home. He gave up the right to shelter his fortune from the modest public investments the Lone Star State refuses to fund.
Mr. Brunson’s NBA contract no doubt puts him in the top tax bracket. If he lives in New York City, he contributes a top combined rate of approximately 14.1%, while if he lives outside the city he contributes roughly 10.3% to the state. Those rates are what keep the subways running past midnight and the public libraries open on weekends—the things Brunson’s teammates’ kids actually use—while a man banking forty million a year grumbles about a line on his pay stub.
New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is celebrating the first Knicks championship in 53 years, as well he should—it happened on his city’s watch, in his city’s arena, before his city’s fans. You will see him at the ticker-tape parade in the urban canyons of the financial district on Thursday. But the opinion factory on Sixth Avenue would rather a championship star complain about his tax bill than a mayor ask the wealthiest New Yorkers to pay their fair share for the city that made them rich. If the mayor gets his way and makes the wealthy pay a fairer share, the Knicks might find themselves attracting free agents who’d rather play in a city where libraries stay open and subways run on time than one where austerity leaves nothing but potholes and closed branches.
By the way, Mr. Brunson famously signed a contract extension in 2024 for something like $100 million below his market value so the Knicks could afford to sign more free agents under the NBA’s team salary limits—an act of loyalty and team-first commitment that every working person who skips a modest raise so the whole enterprise survives will recognize. But it is entirely beside the point. A man who banks more in a single night than the average New Yorker earns in a year does not get to play folk hero for resenting the tax bill that pays for the parade. He took the discount to chase a ring; the city that bankrolled the stage owes him nothing on his civic obligation. The next time he negotiates, it will not be to make up for the tax greed of New York’s politicians, but to offset the leverage the ownership class will hold the moment the cameras turn away.
