Every now and then you get one of these as a fan, right? You get to see your team at the peak of its powers. You get to see it before a full house, inside a building that’s been longing to show off its acoustic might for years. And every once in a long while, you get to see, and hear, and feel all of this while that team is reducing the reigning world champions to a grease spot.
“We’re a really talented team,” OG Anunoby said in the glorious moments after the Knicks had bulldozed the Nuggets, 122-84, “and we went out and we showed that tonight.”
We’re advancing beyond the point of small-sample-size silliness now. The Knicks are 11-2 since trading for Anunoby and completely repurposing their roster, and three of those wins have come against the Timberwolves, the 76ers and, now, the Nuggets, three established members of the NBA’s high-rent group. They won two of them by more than 30 points, and led in the other by 20 before Minnesota made a late run.
The Knicks aren’t a perfect team by any definition but they seem to fit perfectly, even with key players absent, even as they are beginning to fully recognize the massive influence Anunoby has brought. He’s had a positive plus/minus in all 13 games. He was an astonishing plus-38 Thursday.
“He’s finding a good rhythm, making really good decisions, getting downhill,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said of Anunoby, who had six steals and an almost oh-by-the-way team-high of 26 points, his most as a Knick. “He’s making a lot of good plays for us.”
In truth, they all are. Jalen Brunson scored a ho-hum 21 and added four assists, shaking off his fan-fueled snubbing for a starting gig in the All-Star Game (Josh Hart, master needler: “Yeah. Bleeping loser.”) Julius Randle had a routine 17 points, seven rebounds and eight assists. Donte DiVincenzo and Deuce McBride combined for eight 3s.
And to round out a perfect night, if you simply love the sport, you were even allowed to see Nikola Jokic turn in a standard-issue gem (31 points, 11 boards) and still have exactly zero impact on stopping the Knicks locomotive on this night. That’s 19,812 people getting more than their money’s worth right there.
“They had an off-night,” said Brunson, who wasn’t about to read too much into one night of dominance even if he clearly enjoyed every second of it. “That’s not typical of them but a win’s a win. We fought and played well and now it’s on to the next one.”
Added Randle: “We just executed start to finish. We played strong with the lead and were able to sustain it and build as the game went on.”
The Knicks never trailed, never led by less than 10 across the game’s final 42 minutes and 38 seconds, by less than 20 across the final 24:52, by less than 30 across the final 12:30. It was as complete and astonishing a bludgeoning as you could possibly conjure, a basketball mugging in plain and public sight.
It was the kind of battering that likely means little in the big-picture narrative of both teams — the Nuggets are still worthy favorites to defend their title out of the West, the Knicks still fighting for their lives just to sneak into the East’s top four — but also the kind of game that people who care to remember will fondly recall.
Fans of a certain vintage surely remember how an ordinary (for the era) Knicks team crushed the 72-win Bulls, 104-72, in the middle of the 1995-96 season, in what also happened to be Jeff Van Gundy’s first career win. New York hoops fans with even longer memories may recall Feb. 21, 1980, when Iona scored the greatest victory in its history at a raucous Garden, 77-60 over a Louisville team ranked No. 2 in the country, one that exactly 33 days later would win the NCAA Tournament.
This is one you’ll remember for a while, even (and especially) when the Knicks endure the coming cold front that inevitably hits all NBA teams across the long season. Because this was an emphatic piece of testimony that within the current makeup of the roster exists a team that on any given night can pummel the Nuggets and plow the Sixers and punish the Timberwolves.
Not so long ago, that was the knock against the Knicks: dominators of the dregs (and they are 19-0 against teams with losing records) but vulnerable against the venerable. That’s not the case anymore. If it doesn’t make them legit contenders, it damn sure makes them legit, period. And that’s a hell of a place to be as we near the start of February.
