Jalen Brunson confronted former Mavericks owner Mark Cuban about the “jab” at his parents after he signed with the Knicks in the summer of 2022.
Cuban appeared on the podcast the All-Star point guard hosts with teammate Josh Hart and said “I apologize” when Brunson mentioned how the familial diss bothered him.
“The only thing that I … didn’t like about the whole situation was when Mark said, ‘When the parents got involved, that’s when things got messy,’” Brunson said on this week’s episode of The Roommates Show. “So that was the one thing that I was like, I kind of was like, ‘Damn that was a little jab.’”
Brunson was drafted in the second round by the Mavericks out of Villanova and spent four seasons in Dallas before signing a four-year deal worth $104 million with the Knicks two summers ago — shortly after New York had added his father, Rick Brunson, to Tom Thibodeau’s coaching staff.
Cuban, who sold his majority stake in the Mavericks last year to casino mogul Miriam Adelson and her family, had said in April 2023 that negotiations to retain Brunson “went south, when Rick took over, or the parents took over.”
Cuban initially responded that he “didn’t want to go there” on the podcast, and said “there’s no reason for us to talk about any of that stuff,” and “it wasn’t a jab at all” before eventually expressing his regret to Brunson.
“I apologize, if it put you in a certain way, that wasn’t the intention,” said Cuban, who still owns a minority stake in the Mavericks. “But it was hard to deal with. It was a unique negotiation in a lot of different ways.
“There’s definitely no hard feelings at all. But it’s always interesting when your dad and I walk by each other, you know, it’s just like he gives me the eye, I give him the eye, then we smile and then keep on walking, right? And so all is well and ends well. … I’m happy for you, the king of New York, and I’m happy for us.”
The Knicks eventually were docked a 2025 second-round pick for tampering, but Brunson has emerged as one of the top players in the NBA over his two seasons with team, leading them to the second round of the playoffs in back-to-back years.
After he averaged a career-best 28.7 points and 6.7 assists per game to finish fifth in league MVP voting last season, Brunson signed a four-year contract extension worth $156.5 million in July.
He could have waited a year and inked a deal worth as much as $269 million next summer, leaving about $113 million on the table.
The Knicks acquired Brunson’s former Villanova teammate Mikal Bridges in the offseason, but they lost starting center Isaiah Hartenstein to the Thunder via free agency.
“I would say it’s the same negotiation that we just went through with Isaiah. I would say it’s pretty similar,” Brunson said of his departure from Dallas. “It’s over and done with. We’re here now, and that’s that.”
Led by All-Star guards Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, the Mavericks made the NBA Finals in 2024, one year after they had tanked at the end of the 2022-23 season to miss the playoffs.
The Mavericks were ruled to have rested players late in the season to maintain a top-10 protected pick from their 2019 trade with the Knicks for Kristaps Porzingis and they were fined $750,000 for “conduct detrimental to the league.”
