The blueprint for the New York Knicks this season did not include OG Anunoby emerging as a candidate to lead the team in scoring every night.
But the on-the-fly approach is working for the Knicks, who will look to continue winning without Jalen Brunson when they host the Portland Trail Blazers on Sunday night.
The Knicks were off Saturday after earning a 116-107 road win over the Milwaukee Bucks on Friday night. The Trail Blazers haven’t played since Thursday, when they opened up a five-game road trip with a 128-107 loss to the Sacramento Kings.
New York (46-27) entered Saturday with a three-game lead over the Indiana Pacers in the race for the third seed in the Eastern Conference.
The Knicks also improved to 6-5 without Brunson, who leads the team with 26.3 points and 7.4 assists per game but hasn’t played since March 6, when he suffered a sprained right ankle during a 113-109 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Lakers. New York, which has clinched a playoff berth, hopes he will return for the stretch run.
While versatile forward Josh Hart has held at least a share of the team lead in assists eight times in Brunson’s absence, Anunoby has begun emerging as a reliable volume scorer to go alongside Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges, each of whom led or shared the team lead in scoring in the Knicks’ first six games without Brunson.
Anunoby scored a game-high 31 points Thursday — his second 30-point effort in three games. He has scored at least 20 points in five straight games, a span in which he’s averaging 28.4 points per contest — up nearly 11 points from his seasonal average of 17.5 points per game.
Anunoby reached 20 points just 22 times in his first 62 games.
“I always try to be aggressive,” Anunoby said Thursday night. “Just depending on situations — sometimes it comes or sometimes it doesn’t. Just today, I was really aggressive.”
The visit to New York will continue a challenging late-season trek around the Eastern Conference for the Trail Blazers (32-42), whose three-game skid began with losses to the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers, who occupy the top two spots in the East.
The losing streak has dimmed the playoff hopes for Portland, which entered Saturday four games behind the Dallas Mavericks in the race for 10th place in the Western Conference and the final spot in the play-in tournament.
The Trail Blazers may have been feeling the effects of the losses to the Cavaliers and Celtics on Thursday, when they led for less than a minute in their loss to the Kings. It was their most lopsided loss since Feb. 10, when they were routed 146-117 by the Denver Nuggets.
The Kings outrebounded the Trail Blazers 46-32 and limited Portland to just 17 defensive boards.
“I told our guys before the game the most physical team would win the game and I was right,” Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups said. “They were so much more physical than we were. Our thing is always to hit first and we want people retreating playing against us. We didn’t get that done today.”
–Field Level Media
