Team: New York Knicks · Status: standard contract · Position: PG · Season age: 30 · Experience: entering ninth NBA season · Role: primary creator · As of: 2026-07-18
2026-27 median projection
| GP | MPG | FG% | FT% | 3PM | PTS | REB | AST | STL | BLK | TO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 70 | 34.0 | .472 | .845 | 2.6 | 25.4 | 3.2 | 6.8 | 0.8 | 0.1 | 2.4 |
Projected shooting volume is approximately 9.1 makes on 19.3 field-goal attempts and 4.6 makes on 5.4 free throws. Nine-cat: top 25-45 per game. Points: A-, top 25-40 in common volume-friendly systems. Dynasty: 7.3/10, a win-now star entering his age-30 season.
Role and evidence
Brunson's 2025-26 baseline was 26.0 points, 3.3 rebounds, 6.8 assists, 2.6 threes, 0.8 steals, and 2.4 turnovers in 35.0 minutes across 74 games, with .467 FG and .841 FT (Hashtag Basketball). The projection retains his creation and minutes advantage while regressing shooting slightly upward and accounting for postoperative variance.
He remains the unquestioned lead guard. Hart and Bridges can organize secondary actions; McBride and Alvarado are the direct minutes beneficiaries if he sits. Mike Brown's deeper regular-season rotation can shave one minute without lowering Brunson's closing-game control.
Brunson underwent surgery on his left wrist July 7 and was expected back to basketball activities later in the summer (NBA/AP). The base case assumes opening-month availability, not proof that touch, pain tolerance, and contact readiness are already normal.
Market and source disagreement
Alex Barutha's July 14 rapid top 100 placed Brunson 23rd; ESPN's April points board placed him 37th. Hashtag's July 2 analyst dynasty board ranked him 37th and its July 18 keeper crowd 38th, while Dynatyze showed him as the 29th listed player. The difference is largely format and surgery timing, not disagreement about role.
Range
- Ceiling: 72-75 games, 27 points and seven assists with normal wrist mechanics; top-20 category and points value.
- Median: 70 games, 34 minutes, elite scoring/assists/FT contribution with below-average stocks.
- Floor: a slow wrist ramp, efficiency loss, or recurrent pain pushes him toward 55-60 games and outside the top 50 in totals.
Confidence
Role and usage: high. Per-minute counting stats: high. Shooting efficiency: medium because of the wrist. Games played: medium-low until camp contact work is confirmed.
Career record
Pre-NBA: Villanova, three seasons (2015-16 to 2017-18), 116 games, 14.4 points, 2.5 rebounds and 3.7 assists on .510/.393/.820 for his career. By season: 9.6 points on .452/.383/.774 as a freshman on the 2016 national title team, 14.7 points and 4.1 assists on .541/.378/.876 as a unanimous All-Big East first-teamer, and 18.9 points, 3.1 rebounds and 4.6 assists on .521/.408/.802 as a junior. That junior year won him consensus national player of the year — the Wooden, Naismith, AP and Bob Cousy awards — and a second NCAA championship. Draft: 2018, second round, 33rd overall, Dallas. Not traded on draft night. He left Dallas in free agency and signed a four-year, $104 million deal with New York on July 12, 2022.
| Season | Age | Team | GP | MPG | PTS | REB | AST | STL | BLK | 3PM | FG% | FT% | TO |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-19 | 22 | DAL | 73 | 21.8 | 9.3 | 2.3 | 3.2 | 0.5 | 0.1 | 0.9 | .467 | .725 | 1.2 |
| 2019-20 | 23 | DAL | 57 | 17.9 | 8.2 | 2.4 | 3.3 | 0.4 | 0.1 | 0.8 | .466 | .813 | 1.2 |
| 2020-21 | 24 | DAL | 68 | 25.0 | 12.6 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 0.5 | 0.0 | 1.2 | .523 | .795 | 1.2 |
| 2021-22 | 25 | DAL | 79 | 31.9 | 16.3 | 3.9 | 4.8 | 0.8 | 0.0 | 1.2 | .502 | .840 | 1.6 |
| 2022-23 | 26 | NYK | 68 | 35.0 | 24.0 | 3.5 | 6.2 | 0.9 | 0.2 | 2.0 | .491 | .829 | 2.1 |
| 2023-24 | 27 | NYK | 77 | 35.4 | 28.7 | 3.6 | 6.7 | 0.9 | 0.2 | 2.7 | .479 | .847 | 2.4 |
| 2024-25 | 28 | NYK | 65 | 35.4 | 26.0 | 2.9 | 7.3 | 0.9 | 0.1 | 2.3 | .488 | .821 | 2.5 |
| 2025-26 | 29 | NYK | 74 | 35.0 | 26.0 | 3.3 | 6.8 | 0.8 | 0.1 | 2.6 | .467 | .841 | 2.4 |
| Career | 561 | 30.0 | 19.2 | 3.2 | 5.3 | 0.7 | 0.1 | 1.7 | .485 | .827 | 1.8 |
Honors: All-NBA Second Team in 2023-24, 2024-25 and 2025-26.
Fantasy history: Season-end nine-category ranks are not verifiable from public archives and are not estimated here. The category shape has been the same for four New York seasons and is easy to read off the table: elite points, strong assists, good free throw percentage, solid three-point volume, and turnovers that are genuinely low for the usage — 2.4 to 2.5 on a nightly 20-plus attempt scoring load is the underrated part of the profile. Against that, rebounds are thin for a starter, steals are ordinary, and blocks are effectively zero, so he is a four-category producer who costs you nothing in a fifth. Points leagues rate him materially higher than categories do, and always have, because the scoring volume is the dominant input there and the two dead categories carry no weight. He is close to a pure punt-blocks or punt-steals anchor in nine-cat; in a balanced build he forces you to pay up for defensive stats elsewhere.
Durability: 73, 57, 68, 79, 68, 77, 65, 74. The 2019-20 shortfall ended in right shoulder labrum surgery on March 13, 2020. He fractured his left hand in Game 7 of the 2024 Eastern Conference semifinals against Indiana, which was a playoff injury rather than a regular-season absence. The 2024-25 total of 65 was driven by a right ankle sprain: two games missed in November 2024 and then roughly a month after he was hurt at the Lakers on March 6, 2025. The same ankle recurred in 2025-26 — a grade 1 right sprain in November 2025 and another absence in mid-January 2026 — but he still got to 74 games, his second-best total in New York. The live issue is not the ankle: he had surgery on his left wrist on July 7, 2026 with a return to basketball activities expected later in the summer, and that is a shooting-hand-adjacent joint on a player whose value is concentrated in shot-making.
Trajectory: The career is a genuine late bloom, not a gradual curve — he was a 25-minute reserve at 24 and a 28.7-point All-NBA scorer at 27, and essentially all of that jump came from New York handing him the entire offense in 2022-23. That means the usual aging-curve logic applies with a lag: he arrived at his peak later, so age 30 is less alarming than it would be for a player who peaked at 24. Per 36 minutes he scored 29.2 in 2023-24 and roughly 26.4 and 26.7 in the two seasons since, which suggests 2023-24 was the outlier rather than the new baseline, and the last two seasons are his real level. The encouraging signal is that his assists climbed to a career-high 7.3 in 2024-25 and held at 6.8 in 2025-26 while turnovers stayed flat, so the playmaking is still improving as the scoring plateaus — a normal and healthy transition for a lead guard entering his thirties. The concern is efficiency: .467 from the field in 2025-26 is his worst mark since 2019-20, and a small-guard scoring profile built on tough two-point shot-making is exactly the kind that erodes first when burst declines. Whether that was the wrist bothering him through the year or the start of a real decline is the single most important unknown in his 2026-27 case, and it will not be resolved until October.
Career sources: ESPN career stats · ESPN college stats · StatMuse career per game · Wikipedia · NBA.com, 2025-26 ankle absence · NBA/AP, July 2026 wrist surgery
Open questions
- Is Brunson cleared for unrestricted contact and shooting before camp?
- Does the repaired wrist affect three-point or free-throw efficiency in October?