Mavericks rumors: Marc Stein sticks Jalen Brunson dagger in deeper with $55 million ‘laughing’ revelation

The New York Knicks are two games away from winning the NBA Finals, and they’ve been on the backs of their star players to help them get to this moment. Jalen Brunson is doing what he’s always done, and that’s show up when it matters the most to deliver. One fanbase that probably hates seeing Brunson do this is the Dallas Mavericks, which is where Brunson started his career.

Brunson could have stayed with the Mavericks, but they lowballed him, and that’s when he took his talents to the Knicks. NBA insider Marc Stein shared the details of how that moment could have forever changed the Mavericks.

“The Brunson camp basically laughed at them and said, ‘Uh, we’ll take our chances in free agency now, you guys had your chance.’ … The Mavs still had the option at that point of picking up the phone and saying, ‘Jalen, we completely screwed this up, we are deeply sorry, we’ve disrespected you, we want to make this right, we’re going to offer you 150 over five.’ They even could have gone to 175 over five… They had the wherewithal to give Jalen Brunson a blow-away offer and they didn’t do it,” Stein said on the All NBA podcast.

The Brunson camp reportedly "laughed" at the Mavericks when Dallas tried to offer him a 4-year, $55M extension near the 2022 trade deadline, per @TheSteinLine

"The Brunson camp basically laughed at them and said, 'Uh, we'll take our chances in free agency now, you guys had your… pic.twitter.com/fff142MOgN

— NBA Base (@TheNBABase) June 6, 2026

​”If they re-signed him, they either could have kept him with Luka or their phone would have been ringing off the hook with trade offers and they would have had so much better optionality… losing Jalen Brunson for nothing when you combine that with how the Luka trade turned out, like I said, where I live there is a lot of pain when the Knicks are on television,” Stein continued.

Looking back at that time, it was a bad idea for the Mavericks to let Brunson walk for nothing, and it looks even worse now when he’s so close to becoming an NBA champion.

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