Ex-Knicks Star Gets Real About Jalen Brunson Ending New York’s 53-Year Championship Drought

Stephon Marbury spent five seasons trying to drag the Knicks back to relevance. He was then moved on with the rebuild nowhere close to finished and never got to see what came after. A different Knicks cornerstone found himself facing the same question, and not whether the rebuild would ever pay off, but whether he deserved credit now that it finally has under Jalen Brunson.

Julius Randle addressed his connection to New York’s championship when Brazilian content creator Edu Marangoni suggested he should consider himself a champion too, given his role building the foundation.

“Ah no, I appreciate that,” Randle said. “What the organization accomplished is great. Been a long time coming. Took a lot of hard years, a lot of different players, to build it up to what it was. It’s amazing. Definitely look forward to creating that in Brooklyn.”

Randle’s history with the Knicks runs from 2019 to 2024. His five-year stretch saw him become a three-time All-Star, earning two All-NBA selections while the franchise climbed out of nearly a decade of dysfunction.

Head coach Tom Thibodeau built a system around Randle that gave a chaotic organization structure for the first time in years. And Randle himself set the tone that eventually allowed the roster around him to take shape.

The trade that ended his Knicks tenure in September 2024 sent him to Minnesota in a deal that brought Karl-Anthony Towns to New York. And Towns became one of the central figures in the Knicks’ 2026 title run, alongside Jalen Brunson, who arrived separately as a free agent and developed into the engine of the championship roster.

Randle was the trade chip who indirectly delivered one of the two most important pieces of New York’s championship core.

New York had not won a title since 1973. And the franchise spent much of the 2010s getting mocked by fans before Thibodeau’s arrival began the slow climb that Randle was central to for half a decade.

Brunson’s ascension from a modest free-agent signing in 2022 into the unquestioned engine of a championship roster completed a rebuild that Randle helped carry through its most difficult, least glamorous years. The seasons where the Knicks were competitive but never quite good enough, absorbing criticism that Randle wore more visibly than almost anyone on the roster during that stretch.

Randle was traded to the Brooklyn Nets this offseason as part of a four-team deal that also involved LaMelo Ball. He arrives in Brooklyn after a Minnesota stint that ended with the Timberwolves reaching the Western Conference Finals but falling short of the top teams.

Brooklyn finished the 2025-26 season at 20-62. A rebuild in its earliest and most difficult phase, which is precisely the position the Knicks occupied when Randle first arrived there in 2019.

“Definitely look forward to creating that in Brooklyn” is not a passing comment. It is Randle stating that he intends to run the same multi-year process a second time, on the other side of the same city, with a franchise that currently has almost nothing in common with a champion except the address.

Whether Brooklyn’s rebuild eventually produces anything close to what Randle helped build in Manhattan remains to be seen.