This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
In four seasons with the New York Knicks, Jalen Brunson has averaged 26.9 points per game, earned second-team All-NBA honors three times and led the team back to the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years.
It’s the resume of a budding New York legend. Just don’t call Brunson a star.
“I’m not a star,” he said last month.
The context is worth unpacking: In the days before the Eastern Conference finals, a reporter asked Brunson about relinquishing control of the Knicks’ offense during a four-game sweep of the Philadelphia 76ers. Brunson was spending additional time off the ball.
“Some stars might push back,” the reporter posited.
“One, I’m not a star,” Brunson answered. “Two, I want to win.”
Forgive us for fixating on labels for a moment, but the assertion was clearly absurd. Brunson is one of the best guards in the NBA. Yet the fact that he delivered the answer so plainly and directly seemed to reveal something deeper, a window in the Brunson mindset, a powerful tool for maximizing performance.
“The best athletes, executives and coaches I’ve ever worked with are master storytellers,” said Justin S’ua, an executive performance coach who has worked with players and coaches across professional sports. “They have learned how to purposely engineer their self-talk in order to get them to the feeling — the ideal state — that they need to be the best versions of themselves.”
But the relationship between narrative and success is not just anecdotal. There’s research that suggests we can all benefit from acting like Brunson.
For Brunson, the story involves an identity forged on the night of the NBA Draft in 2018. After winning two NCAA Championships and being selected the Associated Press national player of the year at Villanova, his size and athletic profile kept him on the board until the second round, where he was drafted by the Dallas Mavericks.
The experience was disheartening. Brunson believed he had done everything he could to prove himself to NBA teams. It also provided an opening, a label to dwell on and a narrative to create.
“I used that second-round name,” Brunson later said.
It was a familiar strategy used by people in many walks of life. Brunson didn’t just imagine a chip on his shoulder. He engineered a process-oriented mental state, an intentional mindset to which he clung during his first years in the league, as he grew from a backup guard to a free agent worth $104 million in 2022. He could never be a star; he was a second-round pick.
The identity dovetailed with research on the power of the underdog, which just happened to be published during Brunson’s first years in the league. In 2020, Samir Nurmohamed, now an assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania, published a paper that showed evidence that perceiving yourself as an underdog can lead to higher motivation and better performance at work. Then one year later, Nurmohamed and two colleagues took it a step further.
Years of prior research had shown that discrimination and prejudice in the workplace hindered the performance of employees, a self-fulfilling prophecy that caused the targets of the discrimination to perform in line with the underlying assumptions.
In this case, the discrimination was more serious than an NBA team judging a guard’s height and athleticism. But the relationship was similar.
So the researchers set out to examine how self-narratives could counteract prior experiences of prejudice. In one study, they recruited more than 300 unemployed job seekers from a reemployment center in the northeast. Then each participant was randomly assigned to create one of three self-narratives:
- The first was an “underdog narrative” — a story in which the participant was viewed as an underdog but believed they had what it took to succeed.
- The second was a “favorite narrative” — a story in which others set a high bar of expectations for the participant and they also thought they would succeed.
- The third was a non-equivalent control group — the participant was asked to create a general story from their life.
The participants who used the “favorite narrative” showed the usual effect — the discrimination led to lower performance — but those who used the “underdog narrative” saw the relationship all but disappear. They had better outcomes in finding a new job.
The lesson was clear enough: Resilience is not created by pretending that adversity never happened. When people recognize discrimination and then frame themselves in the process of overcoming it, it’s more powerful than leaning on stories of others believing in you.
The finding aligns with a suggestion from Carol Dweck, an American psychologist whose work was most famous for laying the groundwork for the idea of a “growth mindset.” When students think of unrealized goals in the framework of “not yet,” it leads to better outcomes.
By almost any metric, Brunson is an NBA star. He is one of the most skilled scorers in the world. His production and leadership have led to a basketball renaissance in New York.
But his identity remains intertwined with the idea of “not yet.” He is still the undersized guard whose athleticism is constantly doubted.
He is not a star. He can’t be a star.
He wouldn’t be this great if he were.
