Becky Hammon's December criticism of the New York Knicks resurfaced this week after the team clinched the Eastern Conference title on Monday, and on Tuesday she defended her comments while praising Jalen Brunson's performance.
Hammon said she spoke from experience and stressed she could be proven wrong, calling Brunson ‘‘a hell of a player’’ and repeating, ‘‘I said what I said.’’ Brunson's playoff run provided the sharpest rebuttal: he averaged a team-high 26.9 points and 6.6 assists per game while leading the Knicks to their first Eastern Conference title in 27 years and a sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The numbers behind the run underline why Hammon's words grabbed attention. New York entered the postseason on an 11-game winning streak and outscored opponents by 23.8 points per outing during that stretch. The sweep of Cleveland completed a run that turned questions about personnel and playoff readiness into a conference championship, and the Knicks will now await the winner of the Western Conference finals.
The reminder of Hammon's critique goes back to December 2023, when she made the comments on 's NBA Today while the Knicks were 16-11 and sitting fifth in the Eastern Conference. At the time she argued the Knicks ‘‘don't have enough personnel, they don't have the manpower that they need to hang with those guys....they don't have a dude. You gotta have a dude, you gotta have a 1A dude, and they're missing that at the end of the day, if we're just getting down to brass taxes,’’ and added that ‘‘He's too small. If your best player is small, you're not winning.’’ She was careful to note exceptions, saying Stephen Curry was an outlier to that view.
Hammon returned to the remarks on Tuesday and framed them as a historical point, not a personal slight. ‘‘I speak from experience,’’ she said. She reiterated the broader argument in a longer comment that cited past NBA examples: "Allen Iverson got MVP and he lost in the finals. I think the two best teams are probably in the West, but I'm up for being proven wrong. That's the other thing, I think Jalen Brunson's a hell of a player, a hell of a player. I'm speaking historically on the NBA with what I said. I don't know why everybody's so stuck on that. I said it two years ago." She also returned to her concise challenge: "I said what I said. If he proves me wrong, he proves me wrong."
The tension is straightforward: Hammon's premise about how championship teams are built — around a singular, dominant player — collided with Brunson's performance through the 2023-24 campaign, which helped push New York past longstanding postseason hurdles. The narrative clash is amplified because Hammon's comments came when the Knicks were early in a season they would finish by securing a conference crown that had eluded them for nearly three decades.
For now Hammon has left the verdict to Brunson and the team. She called him ‘‘a hell of a player’’ and said she was willing to be proved wrong; the next factual test will come in the Finals against the Western Conference winner. Until then her original line — ‘‘I said what I said’’ — stands as both a challenge and an unbowed assessment from someone who framed the remark as rooted in historical patterns rather than a personal attack.
