Jalen Brunson’s season is turning into magic

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — It was the final head spin that iced the game.

With under a minute to go and the New York Knicks up three, Jalen Brunson noticed his defender’s noggin on a swivel. Keon Ellis, the energetic second-year guard, had manned Brunson for much of the night. By this point, he must have understood that whatever occurred next was up to the man with the basketball, no one else.

Brunson was a bucket away from his second consecutive 40-point game. But at this moment, as the clock wound down, he had to secure the win. So he called for a screen, one that never actually came. Ellis, as if under the command of the Cha Cha Slide, turned to the right, and Brunson jolted in the other direction for a victory-icing floater.

“I saw him kinda looking before,” Brunson told The Athletic. “He turned his head one time or twice and then I just told Isaiah (Hartenstein) to come up, set the screen. He looked, and as soon as he turned, I went.”

The intention wasn’t necessarily to bait the young guard. “If he comes (to) set the screen, he comes to do it,” Brunson said. “I just read it.” But the thought of sneaking past his defender was already in Brunson’s mind.

This is how an All-Star (and probably soon, an All-NBA) point guard thinks.

“I’m just surveying the court and kinda just reacting,” Brunson said. “Once he turned his head, there’s no way he could (see) — unless he’s a magician.”

Yet, even David Copperfield could not have made Brunson disappear Saturday when the Knicks topped the Sacramento Kings 98-91, New York’s third consecutive win. It was as if the basketball player, not the illusionist, was the one holding the wand.

Brunson finished with 42 points on 17-of-28 shooting and 5-of-10 3-point shooting. He bounced through an ultra-physical match unaffected. The NBA has changed over the past month and a half. Scoring is down league-wide, and officials are letting more contact go. The days of three different players dropping 60 points within a week of each other (which actually occurred in late January) seem years, not weeks, ago.

Somehow, no one told Brunson about this.

He’s now gone for 40-plus points in two consecutive games. He dropped 45 Thursday during a 105-93 win over the Portland Trail Blazers. Only three other Knicks have accomplished the same feat. Brunson is the first to do it since Carmelo Anthony in 2014. All of them are inscribed into franchise lore: Anthony, Patrick Ewing and Bernard King.

“He’s our go-to guy. Great that he was able to kinda get into that company,” said Josh Hart, Brunson’s teammate, longtime friend, podcast cohost and greatest critic. “That’s elite company. Maybe he’ll pass a little bit more next game.”

The magic of Brunson’s performance, though, was that it came organically.

The Kings tracked him at all times. If he took a halftime bathroom break, they knew about it. Whenever he curled around a screen, a second defender hurried toward him.

Brunson didn’t force up shots in those moments. He gave up the basketball and quickly relocated. At times, it boomeranged back to him for spot-up 3s. In other cases, he evaded the crowds as if he were a bar of wet soap.

“He’s a hell of a player,” Kings head coach Mike Brown said. “(Aside from) Steph (Curry) maybe, I don’t know if we blitzed anybody as much as we did Jalen tonight, tried to send two (defenders) at him, and he still scored 42 points. … We sent the double-team at him every single time he came off the pick-and-roll in the second half and probably half the time in the first half. He’s a hell of a player.”

The scoring column may appear similar, but Brunson’s overthrow of the Kings did not develop the same way as his 45-point blaze in Portland.

Brunson could not hit a jumper on Thursday. When asked what was working so well for him that night, he responded, “Not my 3-pointer.” He shot only 2-of-10 from deep in that game. But he fought to the paint, got to the free-throw line 17 times and rolled off nifty finish after nifty finish.

Saturday, it was as if a different player was revving to 42. His 3s were falling. So were the jumpers. And the layups. And the floaters. He kvetched to referees, begging for foul calls. It didn’t work. Until the final possession of the game, when the Kings intentionally hacked him, he took only two free throws.

“He’s such a gifted shotmaker. … He knows he’s on the road. It’s going to be tough, and that doesn’t slow him down,” Knicks head coach Tom Thibodeau said.

Forty-two points is not a season high for Brunson. Neither is 45. He dropped a 50-point bomb on the Phoenix Suns earlier this season, which included a perfect second-half shooting performance. But that was back in the age of NBA inflation when 50 was the new 40 and 40 was the new 30.

The Knicks scored 139 points in that game. Against the Kings, they couldn’t even reach triple digits.

Brunson has scored 43 percent of the Knicks’ points over the past two games. When they look for offense, he’s the one finding it — especially when he can deke someone else into peering the wrong way.

“You almost come to expect what Jalen did,” Thibodeau said. “It’s every night and it’s big play after big play. Every time we need a big bucket he comes up with it.”

(Photo of Jalen Brunson shooting over Davion Mitchell: Kyle Terada / USA Today)