What Mikal Bridges thinks about Knicks, why he took less to stay

I’ve stood next to the 7-foot-3 Victor Wembanyama and felt puny, a different type of species. I’ve watched Gerald Green, a high-flying guard with the New Jersey Nets in early 2012, unleash the best in-game dunk in the history of my live viewing, a full windmill off an alley-oop. Again, I felt so utterly unrelatable to another human.

And it happened again on Tuesday inside the Knicks training facility — albeit for bank account reasons —when Mikal Bridges explained why he signed an extension for less than the max.

“I think I’ve got a good amount of money,” Bridges said. “I don’t think a couple more M’s will change my life.”

To be clear, ‘M’s’ means millions. I could never bring myself to abbreviate the word for that amount in the context of money, especially to pluralize it. A single ‘M’ would dramatically alter my existence. But Bridges, whose new deal is worth $150 million, can get away with it. The 29-year-old wing said he took this theoretical discount, which amounts to $6 million less than the max, to help the Knicks maintain financial flexibility.