New York has a new favorite baby name, and you already know what it is.

Since the Knicks finally snapped a 53-year drought and Jalen Brunson walked off the Garden floor with a ring and a Finals MVP trophy, the city has been naming its newborns after Captain Clutch. City health department data reported by The City Reporter shows the number of babies named Jalen more than doubled from March through early October compared to the same stretch last year. Parents were literally picking the name in hospital rooms while the clinching game was still on TV. Let’s not forget little Knickson Fyve.

Cute story. But here’s the plot twist nobody’s talking about.

The name Jalen doesn’t belong to Brunson. It doesn’t even really start with basketball. It starts with one woman in Detroit, one kid who made it famous, and a locker room in Chicago where Brunson’s father happened to share a bench with the original.

Every Jalen in this city leads back to Jalen Rose.

Before Jalen Rose, There Was No Jalen

This is not an exaggeration. When ESPN dug into it, researchers turned up just one person in history named Jalen before Rose, a man in Florida whose parents happened to blend two names the same way. That’s it.

Rose was born in Detroit in 1973 to Jeanne Rose. His biological father was Jimmy Walker, the No. 1 overall pick in the 1967 NBA Draft, a man Jalen never met in person. Jeanne built the name herself. She took “Ja” from James, his father’s name, and “Len” from Leonard, her older brother who drove her to the hospital the day she gave birth.

Ja. Len. A brand new word.

Rose has always given his mom full credit. “If she would’ve named me James or Jason, that wouldn’t have hit the same,” he told ESPN.

It wasn’t always a flex, though. The name was so unusual that young Jalen got teased about it growing up in Detroit, sometimes to the point of fights. Imagine telling that kid that one day half the NBA would carry his name.

The Fab Five Made It a Movement

The name didn’t catch fire until Rose hit Ann Arbor.

In 1991, Michigan signed the most famous recruiting class in college basketball history: Chris Webber, Juwan Howard, Jalen Rose, Jimmy King and Ray Jackson. The Fab Five. Five freshmen who started together and played in back to back national title games in 1992 and 1993.

They didn’t just win. They changed the culture. Baggy shorts. Black socks. Black sneakers. Trash talk and swagger that made old heads clutch their pearls and made every kid on every playground want to be them. If you were around back then, you remember. The Fab Five was more than just a basketball team they were like a hip-hop group that happened to run the floor.

I remember playing pickup ball, and this guy just kept pulling up and screaming “Jalen!” I was like, who? But soon I would find out that the culture and soul of the game had changed. Little did I know that this name would soon be the DNA of today’s baller. Or at least the name of almost all of them.

And parents were paying attention. After Rose’s freshman season in 1992, Jalen showed up on the national baby name charts for the first time. A year later, Jaylen with a Y joined it. Both spellings have stayed in the top 1,000 ever since. The name hit its peak in 2000, the year Rose led the Indiana Pacers in scoring on their run to the NBA Finals.

When the Denver Nuggets drafted him in 1994, Rose became the first Jalen in NBA history. When he retired in 2007, he was still the only one.

That’s wild when you look at the league now.

The Rick Brunson Connection

Here’s where it comes full circle for New York.

Jalen Brunson was born in New Jersey in 1996, right in the middle of the first wave of Jalens that Rose’s college fame created. He’s part of what ESPN eventually called the “Jalen Generation,” the crop of athletes born in the ’90s and early 2000s who all trace their names back to the same guy.

His father, Rick Brunson, was coming up at the same time Rose was. Rick was playing at Temple under John Chaney while Rose was running with the Fab Five at Michigan. Rick went undrafted and grinded his way through a nine-season NBA career that bounced him all over the league, including a stint with the Knicks.

Then in the 2002-03 season, the paths crossed for real. Rick Brunson and Jalen Rose were teammates on the Chicago Bulls. That’s when a young Jalen Brunson got to meet the man whose name he was carrying.

Think about that for a second. The original Jalen, sharing a locker room with the father of the Jalen who would one day bring a championship back to Madison Square Garden. Rose even put on a Knicks uniform himself in 2006.

Today Rick sits on the Knicks bench as an assistant coach, coaching the son who just made history. In 2026 they became the first father and son to win an NBA title together. Rick summed up the whole journey to People simply: “It was just a full circle of family.”

He was talking about the Knicks. He could have been talking about the name.

Jeanne Rose Knew

The most beautiful part of this story is that Jeanne Rose saw it coming.

After she passed away from cancer in February 2021, Jalen went through her things and found a handwritten list. It was every professional athlete named Jalen she had been keeping track of. Jalen Hurts was on it. Jalen Ramsey. Jaylen Brown. And yes, Jalen Brunson, back when he was still a Dallas Maverick.

She was following the legacy she created, one name at a time.

Rose has said he takes that seriously. “I always say that the name Jalen’s a superpower,” he told ESPN. He’s also made the point that nobody hands down a name on a whim. Parents have nine months to think about it, and you have to genuinely love someone to borrow their name for your child. To him, the name is his mother’s legacy more than his own.

So Who Gets the Credit?

Brunson earned this moment. Nobody is taking that away from him. He is the reason a whole new class of New York babies is answering to Jalen, and some of those kids will grow up wearing No. 11 and telling everybody about 2026.

But every one of those babies is also carrying a little piece of Detroit. A little piece of the Fab Five. And a lot of Jeanne Rose.

Brunson is the King of New York right now, even if he won’t crown himself.

Jalen Rose is the reason the crown has that name on it.