This post was written the day after the New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years. And if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to talk about basketball — but I promise this is actually about your business.

On June 13, 2026, Jalen Brunson scored 45 points, won Finals MVP, and delivered New York its first title since 1973. He was the loudest person in the room. He was also, two years earlier, the person who quietly left $113 million on the table so that room could exist at all.

That decision — the one that looked reckless, the one fans compared to a famous contract blunder, the one that raised eyebrows across the league — turned out to be one of the most sophisticated wealth and legacy strategies in recent sports history.

And it has everything to do with how we build businesses.

The $113 million decision

In the summer of 2024, Brunson was eligible to sign a five-year, $269 million maximum contract. He signed a four-year, $156.5 million deal instead.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s $113 million in real, guaranteed money left on the table — deliberately, strategically, by a player who had earned every dollar of the max.

Why? I can only assume, but I believe Brunson had been studying championship organizations. Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. Tom Brady’s New England Patriots. Derek Jeter’s Yankees. He saw a pattern: the franchise players who built dynasties — not just personal resumes — were the ones who structured their contracts to give their teams room to build something bigger than any one person.

In the NBA’s current salary cap structure, a supermax contract doesn’t just cost money. It pushes a team above what’s called the second apron — a threshold that severely limits trades, signings, and the team’s ability to move. Brunson’s pay cut kept the Knicks below that line. And that flexibility built a roster.

What did that roster look like? OG Anunoby, signed to a five-year, $212.5 million deal. Mikal Bridges, traded for at significant cost. Karl-Anthony Towns. Josh Hart. Three of those players — Brunson, Bridges, and Hart — were Villanova teammates who’d already won two NCAA championships together. They knew how to win. They knew how to share.

This is what it looks like when collective trust is the foundation, not an afterthought.

What the research actually says about sharing and winning

I want to pause on something, because this isn’t just a feel-good sports story. There is real data behind what Brunson did — and it applies directly to how you run your business.

A Washington State University study published earlier this year, using NBA data, found that teams with greater pay disparity among their core players had lower winning percentages. Not because the players weren’t working hard — collective effort wasn’t the variable. The mechanism was coordination. Pay equity among core contributors creates tighter cooperation. It quite literally changes how a team moves together.

When one person is compensated wildly beyond everyone else, it doesn’t just create resentment. It creates misalignment. Different stakes, different risks, different relationships to the outcome. The team fractures — not in obvious ways, but in the small moments that add up: the loose ball nobody dives for, the defensive rotation nobody bothers to set.

Oxford research puts it plainly: when value is created collectively, it should be shared collectively.Not as a moral statement. As a functional one.

Sound familiar? Think about the founder who underpays their team and then wonders why no one is as invested as they are. Think about the business owner who hoards decision-making and then burns out because they’re doing everything alone. Think about the CEO who won’t distribute credit and then can’t figure out why nothing scales.

The Brunson model isn’t charity. It’s engineering.

Why this only works from a regulated nervous system

Here’s the part nobody talks about — and it’s the part that matters most for you.

What Brunson did is genuinely hard. Not mathematically. Relationally, neurologically. Choosing to defer immediate reward for long-term collective gain requires a specific internal condition: the ability to tolerate uncertainty without going into survival mode.

When your nervous system is in a threat state — chronically activated, scanning for danger, operating from scarcity — your time horizon collapses. You can’t think in years. You can barely think in weeks. Everything becomes about now: secure the money, protect the position, take what’s yours before someone else does.

This is not a character flaw. This is biology. A dysregulated nervous system literally narrows your cognitive field. It’s why smart people make short-sighted decisions. It’s why high-achieving founders who are chronically stressed keep chasing tactics instead of building strategy. It’s why you might know what the long play is — and still not be able to choose it.

Brunson’s decision required him to hold a vision two, four, six years out, and trust it more than the number on the table today. That kind of long-range decision-making is a regulated nervous system function. Full stop.

When we talk about regulation being the strategy — this is what we mean. Not bubble baths. Not slowing down for the sake of it. We mean: your capacity to access long-term thinking, to see the full picture, to make the kind of decisions that compound — that lives in your window of tolerance. In how safe your body feels.

You can’t build a legacy from a threat state. You can only react to the present one.

The return on the legacy investment

Two years after the pay cut, here’s where Brunson stands:

He’s an NBA champion. He’s a Finals MVP. He scored 45 points in a closeout game, on the road, against a generational talent in Victor Wembanyama, in a building his dad was in as an assistant coach. His name will live at Madison Square Garden forever.

And the money? By 2028, Brunson will be eligible to sign the largest contract in NBA history — a projected five-year, $417 million deal. More than $83 million per year. The pay cut didn’t reduce his earning potential. It deferred and multiplied it.

He didn’t sacrifice wealth for legacy. He used legacy-building as a wealth strategy.

His teammate Josh Hart said it best: “He keeps proving people wrong, game by game, series by series.” The ‘people’ who were wrong were the ones who saw the sacrifice and couldn’t see the sequence.

That’s what happens when you build from regulation. You see sequences. You see systems. You stop optimizing for the next 90 days and start building something that outlasts you.

What this means for your business

You don’t have to be a professional athlete for this to matter. The question Brunson answered in 2024 is the same one founders face all the time, just with different stakes:

Do I optimize for what I can get right now — or do I build toward what I actually want this to become?

Do you underpay your team to protect your margin, or do you share equitably and watch coordination improve? Do you hoard the credit, the knowledge, the decisions — or do you distribute them and create something that doesn’t require you at every node? Do you take every dollar on the table today, or do you sequence for a larger, longer return?

There is no right answer in the abstract. But there is a right answer for you — and you’ll only be able to find it if you can access the part of your brain that thinks in years, not quarters.

That access lives in your nervous system.

And if you’re not sure what state yours is operating from right now — whether you’re in Mobilized survival, Collapsed shutdown, or Resourced expansion — that’s exactly where we start.

Find out which stress state is running your business

The Stress State Assessment takes less than three minutes. It’ll show you whether you’re in The Mobilized state (high activation, urgency, reactive decisions), The Collapsed state (low energy, avoidance, disconnection), or The Resourced state (clear, grounded, long-range thinking).

Because Brunson’s move wasn’t genius despite the pressure he was under. It was possible because of how he’d learned to carry it.

The question is: what decisions are available to you, from where you’re operating right now?

→ Take the free Stress State Assessment

— Gigi