For Braden Smith, the Knicks' Jalen Brunson proves there's hope for the little man at the next level
Yeah, Brunson is three-plus inches taller than Smith, but the former Purdue star has overcome his lack of height through a career marked by overachievement.
If you wondered if there was room for the little man in basketball, if you wondered, like WNBA coach Becky Hammon did a few years back, whether a player in the six-foot range could lead his team to the WNBA title, you got your answer in the last couple of weeks. Just like Isiah Thomas and Tony Parker and Steph Curry before him (and Steve Nash should have won a ring with Phoenix), a pint-sized NBA player can, in fact, lead his team to the NBA title the way Jalen Brunson did these past few months.
That’s not to say that Braden Smith, the former Purdue star and college basketball’s assist king, compares with Brunson, who is a one-in-a-million player who is 6-2 (three inches taller than Smith) and is uniquely gifted with an ability to use angles and his will and his mind to wear down opponents. It is, instead, a fact that provides hope to player like Smith, who isn’t 6-foot on a good day (he measured out at 5-10 1/4).
Well, maybe not hope, necessarily – that may be the wrong word -- but it’s confirmation that there’s still room in the NBA for the smaller player. It does not go without notice that Brunson and Smith had similar statistics during college, both were and will be a second-round pick and both are 6-2 or shorter.
“I don’t think (the NBA Finals) made me think differently, but it definitely gave hope to people our size,” Smith said Monday after he, Purdue teammate Trey Kaufman-Renn, and others did a pre-draft workout for the Pacers. “I know he’s (Brunson) a little taller than me, but to see that people that size, they have a chance, that it is possible, it’s doable and obviously I have enough confidence in myself, in my game and my ability to go out and perform to be special like that.
“…At the end of the day, it gives a lot of people hope and especially with that run (the Pacers had), like with TJ (McConnell) and (Andrew) Nembhard, like it was good to see that it gave smaller guards a lot of hope.”
Speaking of McConnell, who went undrafted and forged a decade-long career:
