A question of health
Anunoby returns Wednesday — only he knows if he’ll play against Raptors
It turns out there’s a bright side to the trade that sent OG Anunoby to the New York Knicks while simultaneously sending the Raptors season into a tailspin.
As the rebuilding Raptors slog through the meaningless dregs of a lottery-bound campaign, at least there’s this: They don’t have to fret about whether or not Anunoby will stay healthy down the stretch.
Now Anunoby’s notorious fragility is very much New York’s problem, and a bigger one than the Knicks could have probably fathomed. It is a sad thing to say because, in a lot of ways, Anunoby has been a perfect acquisition in the sport’s self-proclaimed mecca. When he arrived in New York it was though he was tailor-made for the team and for coach Tom Thibodeau’s grind-it-out sensibilities. The Knicks went 12-2 in Anunoby’s first 14 games in the blue and orange, establishing themselves as one of the NBA’s best defensive teams over that stretch with Anunoby playing 35 minutes a night and racking up astonishingly impressive plus-minus numbers.
Alas, Anunoby missed the ensuing 18 games with an elbow injury. Seeing as Anunoby’s absence coincided with that of Knicks all-star Julius Randall, New York went a dismal 8-10.
And while fans in Gotham were understandably thrilled when Anunoby returned to the starting lineup a couple of weeks back and the Knicks, like clockwork, reeled off three straight wins, the excitement was short-lived.
Nobody questions the indispensability of the six-foot-eight Anunoby’s combination of long-limbed defensive relentlessness and 38 per cent career three-point shooting. That’s well established. But if the best ability is availability, Anunoby is yet again proving to be a liability. Since he first suited up for New York after the late December trade, the Knicks have played 38 games. Anunoby has been available for a mere 17 of them.
Depending on the status of the right elbow discomfort related to February surgery to remove bone from the area that continues to plague him, it’s anyone’s guess if he’ll be in the lineup when the Knicks pay a visit to Toronto on Wednesday.
That isn’t exactly a shocker to Raptors fans. In the three seasons that preceded this one, Anunoby missed 33 per cent of available games in Toronto. This year, that number is already at 38 per cent.
Depending on your perspective, Anunoby has (a) experienced a remarkable run of rotten luck in his star-crossed quest to stay healthy, or (b) built a reputation as a player with few qualms about remaining on the shelf until he’s 100 per cent healthy, or awfully close.
There’s probably truth to both. About this time two years ago, with the Raptors making a push for the playoffs, Anunoby missed most of a month while dealing with the discomfort of a small non-displaced fracture of the right finger on his right (shooting) hand. It was notable because Toronto head coach Nick Nurse barely hid his befuddlement in Anunoby’s decision to sit out.
Before that 15-game absence from the lineup, Nurse recounted one particular practice at which he essentially made a case that Anunoby ought to play; that the team needed him; that 80 per cent or 90 per cent of Anunoby was better than 100 per cent of anything residing on Toronto’s thin bench.
“I kind of said to him, ‘I can tell (the finger is) bothering you a little bit, but I still want you to take the shots,’ ” Nurse told reporters. “‘When they’re rhythm shots and they get kicked out to you and they are wide open threes, you have to keep taking them and figure out how to will them in and figure out something different you might have to do with the pain and whatever.’
“We were having a pretty good, positive, lighthearted, constructive … conversation, so I’m disappointed (that Anunoby is sitting out).”
Going back to the beginning of his college career at Indiana, Anunoby has missed swaths of games with an astonishing variety of ailments. As a Hoosier his draft stock suffered after he tore an ACL. As a Raptor, he missed the 2019 championship run recovering from an appendectomy and the complications of a subsequent infection. Beyond that, he has been excluded from lineups for an eye contusion and a leg muscle cramp (one game each); various calf strains (18 games); multiple ankle sprains (11 games); a wrist sprain (nine games); and a hip pointer (13 games). Earlier this season, while still in Toronto, he practised lefthanded while recovering from what the team termed a right finger laceration suffered while doing household chores (three games). And that’s just the beginning of the list.
Call it bad luck. Call it fragility. But don’t expect the Knicks to call the circumstances of his current sidelining into question. There’s a reason it’s rare to see a coach raise an eyebrow at a player’s injury-related absence, the unusually frank Nurse exempted: Decisions on availability ultimately come down to the player. And some players are more leery than others of putting themselves at risk.
If discretion is the better part of valour, let’s just say Anunoby is making a name for showing a heroic abundance of caution in the of self-preservation.