At first you don’t see it. Like the rest of the 19,812 people at the Garden, or the 23.2 million viewers watching elsewhere, you’re following the ball. Jalen Brunson takes a step forward before Victor Wembanyama and De’Aaron Fox rush to converge on him, and then uses the momentum of his jump back to jump and gently launch the ball in a rainbow toward the basket. There are a few milliseconds where no one on the court seems to move or react and then, as everyone reflexively falls toward the basket, OG Anunoby is there.
It’s hard to follow even on replay because Anunoby moves so fast that there’s no point where you can pause the tape and his body won’t be blurred. All the usual metaphors don’t work. It is not an arrow or a missile (easy, warmonger), perhaps the closest thing is a diving bird of prey, but we cannot know with certainty if a bird of prey takes its instincts into account.
In about five steps, starting from the end of the scorer’s table where he passed to Brunson, Anunoby reaches for the ball. By then, Stephon Castle and Dylan Harper also jump behind him, so that three long arms tangle in the grainy orange leather. Anunoby is not first because he is fast, nor because he did not hesitate to start his thunderous run towards the hoop, nor because he is stronger or more athletic. They’re all factors, but the main reason is that each component (the long stride, knowing when to get off the ground, the ability to soften your touch enough to tip a ball instead of hitting it with full force of momentum) is reflective. It is practiced alone or in sequence hundreds of times. In games, in real practice, in your head, the stakes vary, but the stakes aren’t really a factor. He did it without knowing if Castle or Harper would deflect it with their bodies or if the ball might bounce away. He did it because the arc of Anunoby’s career leading up to, well, that arc, has been one of effort, willingness, and ability to emerge from any given moment as its leading man, even if he is. Benevolence, you might say (Karl-Anthony Towns did: “God’s right hand can’t spell god without OG”), but above all, a very deadly job.
OG Anunoby did not officially play in the AAU tournament where he was discovered and recruited by Indiana University. He was on the court stealing steals, running up and down the court, dunking, hitting 3-pointers and, of course, tipping the ball, but his name wasn’t on any of the Atlanta tournament programs. Tom Crean, then-Indiana coach, was stationed on the baseline with his assistants watching a couple of other highly touted prospects and instead found himself captivated by Anunoby. They flipped through the compiled player guides for the tournament and found no record of it.
Anunoby had initially been eliminated due to a broken wrist that ended his junior year in Jefferson City early, so his name was not on any tournament materials. Crean tracked him down through the tournament director, invited Anunoby to campus and then recruited him.
In much of the NBA draft and scouting process, there is a sense that beyond the most hyped names, you have to look. Not just for talent, but also for form, style and skill, all weighed against the health and longevity of a young athlete, prospects must be “future-ready.” Even the best at this type of exploration make mistakes, and the best also recognize the role that luck and timing play. When you really start to consider the conditions necessary for a person to be drafted, and then you land on a team that will have a complementary development program or plan for that person, it becomes even more surprising who makes it and who stays in the league.
Anunoby ended up being drafted by the Toronto Raptors because he was coming off a devastating ACL injury that ended his second year in Indiana after 16 games. Masai Ujiri, then president of the Raptors, admitted as much, saying on draft night that “if he doesn’t have that injury, I don’t think we have a chance.” Anunoby had fallen to 23rd place.
Even if the Raptors weren’t expecting Anunoby, they were ready for him. A group that had stubbornly lost in only the most heartbreaking ways for seasons, even before the three straight postseason losses that coined the term “LeBronto,” the locker room Anunoby joined had a particularly honed, tough spirit with a deep understanding of what it means to weaken. The Raptors were a pest. For an athlete who used to tirelessly call his high school coaches to let him into the gym, and so I called the middle school coaches when the high school coaches stopped answering, it felt like home.
The Raptors’ style was all ugly intangibles, accumulating play that fueled a high-touch, ball-sharing offense that, while unspectacular, was as relentless as the defense that sparked it. All backed by high-IQ decision making, driven by soil expert Kyle Lowry.
There may be more elegance to the way the 2025-2026 NBA Finals Knicks play (they’ve evolved throughout the postseason to play), but there’s also a family DNA running through the team. Jalen Brunson is the engine and the ballast, Karl-Anthony Towns, the great crafty capable of moving his opponents at will; Mikal Bridges, the star shooter, and Josh Hart, the Swiss Army knife skill set that deploys what’s needed beyond the boxscore. If you’re trying to mirror this Knicks team with that Raptors group, then Anunoby is the player he was compared to in his own draft scouting: Kawhi Leonard. And yet, it is more.
In his rookie season, Anunoby started his first NBA game on November 14 because Norman Powell suffered a hip injury that sidelined him for four games. A month later, Anunoby led all starting rookies in offensive and defensive rating, had the best turnover-to-assist ratio for a position other than shooting guard and maintained the third-highest true shooting percentage.
“Sometimes as a young player, you overthink and try to do everything right. But when he comes in, he just plays,” Raptors coach Dwane Casey said at the time. “That young man is doing a good job.”
Anunoby started professionally in basketball which required repetition, work for work’s sake. Those Raptors also had the kind of self-awareness that only comes after suffering big losses together, the kind of blows that force you to take your ego out of you. The team had a lot on the court, then lost DeMar DeRozan, and just before his second season in Toronto began, Anunoby’s father, his namesake, died. Anunoby was away from the team twice that fall, for a memorial for his father in Jefferson City and then for his funeral in Nigeria.
As in life, low moments (and losses) can bring clarity. There was a deep level of care and mutual respect within that group of Raptors. It only crystallized as the season progressed. The saying “play for each other” is used a lot in basketball, but with how changing NBA rosters are, teams don’t do it consistently; Even more unlikely is that, by looking, you can actually see what is happening. Anunoby also missed the championship race in Toronto with what seemed like the world’s most unexpected appendicitis moment; There’s a feeling watching him win and play for his Knicks teammates now that it’s that past version of Anunoby merging with the current one, finally unleashing the moves and motivation he had to freeze in 2019.
Of course, that’s oversimplifying it. Ash athletics Eric Koreen, Raptors senior writer presentedAnunoby has come this far, he has improved to this point, because he constantly works on what needs to be improved until it is solved. It sounds simple, but it’s a strange and fickle trait. It’s common for a player to add one skill to his tool belt at a time (a passable three-point shot or improving play through contact) and be done for a while. Anunoby has worked with the same quiet persistence across its entire toolkit and has shown one or more of those polished, polished improvements in every game in this series.
Dating back to his ghostly appearance in that AAU game, where he was a nameless presence, Anunoby has always been good at disrupting your defensive brand. He stays in the corner, lulling opponents into thinking the defense is set, only to appear and deflect the ball, or suddenly be behind them, a brick wall or screen they become. He’s been threatening Stephon Castle, De’Aaron Fox and even Victor Wembanyama in the same way. But Anunoby also protected all the NBA superstars with the cool imperturbability that is displayed now.
It’s been beautiful to see so many people become familiar with Anunoby’s bewildered demeanor, a trait that is old or dates back to Anunoby Sr., who he told his children choose your words precisely and that “if you have to speak, you must say something that does not take away from the conversation, but rather enriches it.”
Very little space is given to one of the most common emotional phenomena that a fan feels, which is when a favorite leaves you. Whether the departure is prolonged or abrupt, friendly or bitter, the only constant is the recognition that it is all part of the NBA’s larger machine. A shake system. A system that, through its speed and mechanization, reinforces the idea that you’re not supposed to worry so much about what happens to a person whose footwork you memorized like the steps of a dance.
Maybe that’s the silver lining of losing a favorite player in a trade, that when they move on to bigger things, on much bigger stages, you see flashes that take you back to your own fandom. Still, it’s disingenuous for Anunoby to suggest that what he’s showing in this series is somehow out of nowhere or completely unexpected. It is equally disingenuous to point to drafting or development as ways to get the same result in a new way.
NBA arcs are not replicable, no matter how much general managers and scouts hope that is true. There are beautiful, fleeting moments when an athlete’s past aligns with the present to show a clear vision of potential as it develops, but that clarity comes in retrospect.
The chain of events that led Anunoby to what could be his second title and first Finals appearance are inextricably linked to his development: the physical setbacks, the group he grew up with in Toronto, the patience he had playing behind Pascal Siakam and then Kawhi Leonard; Getting to New York and, to some extent, starting over, and then again with Mike Brown. His competitive profile is equally linked to his lived experience, his family and his upbringing, the dual confidence and need to be of service to others instilled in him by his father and mother, a Nigerian national athlete, whom he lost when he was just one year old.
It’s the uniqueness that makes it so special, the arc of any athlete who traces these unique highs like fingerprints, which makes watching it happen all the more amazing. It will only happen once.
