Jalen Brunson picked the exact month his name is worth more than it’s ever been worth to hand his entire commercial operation to two people who’ve never run an agency in their lives.
That’s not a metaphor. Thirty Third Management Group launched this week as the family-owned brand advisory firm behind the Knicks star’s off-court business, and the roles read like a family reunion with letterhead. Sandra Brunson, his mother, is president. She’s actually been running his commercial operations for eight years already, just without the LLC attached to it, and now she has a title that matches the job.
Erica Brunson, his sister, is director of client services. She’ll lead a new firm initiative built around women’s professional sports, which is its own story for another day. That’s the bet underneath all of it: the two people with zero incentive to overextend Brunson’s name commercially are the ones now running it.
Brunson insourced the entire operation.
Thirty Third Management Group isn’t just a mom-and-sister shop, either. Connor Cashaw, a friend since their days as teammates at Stevenson High School in Illinois, joined in 2025 as director of business development, and the firm plans to represent pro and amateur athletes, including NIL talent, alongside corporate executives, entrepreneurs and philanthropic foundations. The name is the easy part: Brunson went No. 33 overall to Dallas in the 2018 draft, and Thirty Third is just that number with a business card.
The timing is the actual story, though.
Brunson signed a four-year, $156.5 million extension with the Knicks that kicked in with the 2025-26 season, and he did it by walking away from roughly $113 million more he’d have been eligible for by waiting a year for a full max deal worth an estimated $269 million. That’s not a max contract. It’s a below-market deal, signed in the country’s biggest media market, by a guy who won a championship and Finals MVP months earlier and is currently worth more, commercially, than at any point in his career. Most players in that spot outsource the branding to a firm built for scale, one with its own client roster and its own incentives, because that’s how the industry is set up to work.
Chris Haynes had the initial report, roles included:
https://twitter.com/ChrisBHaynes/status/2100192985422156146
Every detail there checks out against what the family confirmed publicly, down to Cashaw’s title. None of it reads like a vanity project, and none of it reads like a firm designed to grow Brunson’s name faster than his actual value can support.
My mom calls after almost everything I write, mostly to make sure I’m eating and not because she follows sports. Sandra Brunson took that same instinct and turned it into eight years of actual business management before anyone made the job official.
There’s a bigger number coming, too. Brunson becomes eligible for a new max extension in 2028, one that could land at $323 million over four years or $418 million over five, and every commercial decision he makes between now and that number gets filtered through whoever’s steering his image. Hand that job to an outside advisory firm and you’ve handed them a say in how you’re perceived during the biggest contract window of your career. Brunson handed it to the two people on earth with no reason to inflate it.
The biggest market in the league doesn’t get to write his story. His mother does.
