ESPN's "Analytics Guru" Just Ensured A Freshly Motivated Jalen Brunson For The Knicks Title Defense After Saying He's Around The 25th Best Player In The NBA

Dustin Satloff. Getty Images.

So ESPN released their Top 100 NBA players rankings the other day, with the Top 10 appearing below:

I may have thought that keeping the leader of a team that just blitzed through the playoffs in historic fashion and took down the next face of the league in a gentleman's sweep by closing out the series by putting up 45 of his team's 94 points on the road out of the Top 5 was a bit of a stretch, especially considering two guys in that Top 5 have trouble staying in shape or healthy for the grueling 100 or so games it takes to win a title. But those guys are superstars in their own right and the rankings were generally accepted as much as any rankings can be accepted by the internet in 2026.

Then ESPN's analytics guru, whatever the fuck that means, weighed in:

We are really gonna do this again, huh? I thought The Company Formerly Known As The Worldwide Leader had finally bent the knee and smartened up on The King Of New York's standing among NBA royalty. But now we are going back to the well of using numbers, both metrics and size, to measure how good a player is instead of what we see with our actual eyes during the actual game without computing numbers like circumference of a player's balls, which I have to believe has Brunson off the charts. 

As a wise man once said…

Not to mention Brunson putting up numbers like this when it actually matters.

I honestly don't know what else Jalen Brunson has to do to get respect from this pocket of nonbelievers that refuse to acknowledge his greatness. Maybe there needs to be an Excel formula that figures out "When it was time to be better than Jalen Brunson, was this player better than Jalen Brunson?". When the most boring program of the MS Office suite says "No", maybe then Jalen can move up these dorks' rankings? 

The defensive nitpick is funny to me considering how many guys in that Top 10 are nowhere near shutdown defenders. Brunson may not be Gary Payton on defense. But he is an super competivie, annoying pest that led the league in drawing charges last season and did a great job tipping passes on the team that had the best defensive rating in the NBA.

Then we come back to the size critique yet again, which seems like the most ridiculous thing to continue to bring up considering this is what Brunson did in the biggest game against the biggest player who had just won the first ever unanimous Defensive Player of the Year Award.

I could keep going on and on about this like many Knicks fans have been for doing for years their guy. But as another wise man once said, they don't deserve it.

So instead I will just apologize to the cast of Saturday Night Live because you know the host for this week's show is going to be extra testy since he'll probably be working out before AND after rehearsals since he is a sick fuck motivated by people doubting him and he just got a fresh batch of doubt/motivation handed to him. So thanks ESPN Analytics Guru for ensuring our captain is dialed in as the Summer of Brunson winds down and the Knicks title defense begins!