This is the part that lends hope for other nights, and other games, on the other side of the season, when there will be an open casting call for alpha dogs, willing and able to take their turn at the most necessary moments. Every night lately, it’s been someone else.
This time it was OG Anunoby. He was playing against his former team, and he made his first 11 shots of the night and finished with 31, while playing his own personal parlor game of defense, picking a designated opponent to completely shut down and constantly shuffling the deck.
That was what it took for the Knicks to roll over the Raps, 139-125, on a night when Jalen Brunson missed his first six shots from the field and his first three from the line.
Two nights earlier in New Orleans, it had been Brunson who’d delivered 39 points and a stretch of the third quarter when he simply announced that the Knicks were not going to be picked off by the feisty Pelicans, this on a night when Karl-Anthony Towns was largely invisible thanks to foul trouble.