The day before the loss that ended the New York Knicks’ season, OG Anunoby pitched his head coach.
Anunoby had not played since Game 2 of the group’s second-round series against the Indiana Pacers, a battle that would end in his team’s seven-game demise. The 26-year-old forward was not running yet, still nursing the hamstring he strained 11 days earlier. But with the Knicks one defeat away from elimination and with the rest of the roster reeling, all notions of what should be considered healthy vanished.
“I wanted to at least try and help my teammates. … I wanted to at least be out there,” Anuboby said.
So that’s what he told Tom Thibodeau.
The Knicks were fighting for their lives, and Anunoby, hamstring be damned, wanted to play. He must have made a persuasive argument.
Anunoby started Game 7 on Sunday against the Pacers but moved as if he were taking a Willis Reed impression too far. He could not sprint, defend and drive. Thibodeau removed him from the game less than five minutes after tipoff and never subbed him back in.
“I just didn’t feel like he was moving well,” Thibodeau said. “It didn’t make sense.”
A man famous for approaching every game as if it were his team’s last was the one who had to save Anunoby from himself.
Such was the way of this season’s Knicks, who lost Game 7 to the Pacers 130-109 ending their playoff run one win short of the Eastern Conference finals. New York gave and gave until it had nothing left.
“This group, we didn’t make excuses for anything,” Jalen Brunson said. “If things happened, we moved forward with what we had. Obviously, we want everyone healthy. I think that’s the most important thing, but I think as a group, we had that mindset of next man up. We really took that to heart.”
Anunoby was one of many.
Less than 48 hours after straining a muscle in his abdomen, Josh Hart was fussing around the court, setting screens on the impervious Aaron Nesmith and scrapping for rebounds.
Minutes after fracturing his hand in the third quarter, Brunson was attempting to re-enter the game. He played for 14 seconds, realized his grip did not feel right, then exited again, heading to the locker room only to learn that an errant swipe at Pacers point guard Tyrese Haliburton broke not just his ambitions but a bone, too.
The Knicks could have fielded a playoff team with just their injured players.
They did not have Julius Randle, who dislocated his shoulder in January and has not played since. They did not have Mitchell Robinson, who returned from ankle surgery, re-injured the ankle, returned from that injury and then hurt it again earlier in the Pacers series, requiring another operation. Bojan Bogdanović wasn’t available for Game 7 either after undergoing foot surgery during the first-round series against the Philadelphia 76ers.
New York concluded an overachieving season, its first 50-win campaign in 11 years and a rise to the No. 2-seeded team without any of its opening-day starters on the court. The hurt of a historic offensive performance from the Pacers, whose 67.1 percent shooting performance in Game 7 was the best in an NBA playoff game, was topped only by the physical pain that accompanied this run.
The Knicks won despite injuries all season. As the incline steepened, they pedaled and pedaled — until the wheels came off.
“This team is special,” Brunson said. “In a way that I can’t really explain.”
Once a fallen franchise, the Knicks did not always boast this competitive culture, which has become their defining personality trait. A feeling of “What if” has permeated up and down the organization with each tweak, twist, sprain and pull that crumbled their season.
The Knicks went 12-2 in the 14 games that immediately followed their midseason trade for Anunoby. Injuries to both Randle and Anunoby derailed the run. Randle never returned.
The January Knicks will be an internal topic heading into the offseason. This group looked like a contender when at full strength. But there is no guarantee the same crew will be back in 2024-25.
The first question of the summer is about the coach, the one who renovated the culture. Thibodeau is now entering the final season of his contract. The two sides will engage in extension negotiations this summer. The Athletic’s Shams Charania reported last week that the Knicks “very much want to lock (him) in” long term and that a new deal could approach eight figures annually. Coaches don’t come on discounts anymore, not after Monty Williams reset the market with a six-year, $78 million contract last summer with the Detroit Pistons.
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