Jalen Brunson and Tyrese Haliburton went to battle on the hardwood during the New York Knicks vs. Indiana Pacers second-round playoff series this past season, but it's possible we could eventually see them on a different battleground: a WWE ring.
Brunson and Haliburton, both All-NBA players, likely have some years left in their NBA careers, but Brunson is not shutting down the possibility of wrestling against Haliburton in WWE.
“I’m never going to say never,” Brunson said during Fanatics Fest NYC. “Maybe we can speak it into existence.”
Could Jalen Brunson vs. Tyrese Haliburton happen in WWE?
Brunson and Haliburton have already appeared on WWE programming, as the pair of NBA players got involved during a Logan Paul vs. LA Knight vs. Santos Escobar triple threat match on ‘Smackdown' in June. The event took place at Madison Square Garden, the home arena of Brunson's Knicks, and during the match, Haliburton (sporting a ‘Tyrese 3:17 shirt') attempted to come to the aid of Paul with a pair of brass knuckles but was distracted by Brunson, who jumped over the barricade.
After the match, Haliburton and Paul appeared ready to attack Knight, although Brunson entered the ring with a steel chair, which eventually caused Paul and Haliburton to flee.
While the WWE-NBA crossover worked out well, it did cause some panic among Knicks fans, as during Brunson's brief in-ring appearance, he winced and looked at his left hand, which he had broken during the playoffs and recently had surgery on to repair. The seemingly random act seemed to indicate a reaggravation of his injury, but Brunson said after the fact that he was improvising.
“I did freestyle a little bit, and the part I freestyled, everyone freaked out over,” Brunson said on the ‘Roommates' podcast. “My sisters sends me this screenshot… of a tweet of a person screenshotting the video and looking at my hand being bent and so it was just like a broken heart, like it was a bunch of broken hearts. Everyone was like, ‘Just stay home! Stop playing around, wrap him in bubble wrap!'”
While it seems like Brunson is OK, it surely will not help any potential case for a WWE match — as an active NBA player, anyway. Although Dennis Rodman and Karl Malone famously wrestled in WCW in the 1990s to capitalize on their fame and the Chicago Bulls vs. Utah Jazz rivalry, the Knicks and Pacers very understandably will likely not allow that to happen with Brunson and Haliburton.
NBA contracts have clauses that state what activities players cannot do, and professional wrestling is almost assuredly one of them. In any case, Brunson and Haliburton, both of whom make much more than Malone and Rodman did (the pair of current players will each make $180 million or more over the next five years) and thus do not need to wrestle to make a lot of money.
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