KNICKS NEED THE NEW GUYS Heat too much for Bulls in play-in, get matchup with Celtics
OG and Bojan critical to team’s playoff success
This Knicks‘ first-round playoff series against the Philadelphia 76ers won’t come down to just Jalen Brunson. It won’t come down to head coaching chops in a dogfight between Tom Thibodeau and Nick Nurse. It won’t come down to limiting Philly’s All-Star guard in Tyrese Maxey or limiting Joel Embiid, the league’s reigning MVP. The Knicks will win this series on the margins, the margins they struck a pair of mid-season trades to improve for this very playoff run.
If the Knicks are to win this series, they will do so because of OG Anunoby and Bojan Bogdanovic, and the offensive burst the pair of stars will need to provide when the Sixers force the ball out of Brunson’s hands.
There’s no secret the Sixers’ defensive game plan against the Knicks’ AllNBA bound guard is two-fold: deploy lanky wings against the 6-1 Brunson, and throw two, sometimes even three, defenders at him to force the ball out of his hands.
From the blitz, the ball will likely go from Brunson to either Josh Hart or Isaiah Hartenstein, who will have a four-on-three advantage on offense.
And with the Sixers both unlikely to help off Donte DiVincenzo, who holds the franchise record for threes made in the season, and unlikely to help off the player in the dunker’s spot (either Hart or Hartenstein), which would cede an instant two points via an uncontested finish at the rim, the ball is bound to find Anunoby: a total eraser on defense who is a modest scorer on offense.
Modest until he becomes aggressive, which is how the Knicks will need both Anunoby and Bogdanovic to play to take some of the defensive pressure off of Brunson.
“Yeah, [I’m] definitely being more aggressive with my shot more [in the playoffs],” Anunoby said after Thursday’s practice. “Just making the right play.”
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Thibodeau suggested it was a coincidence.
With just a handful of games remaining on their schedule before the April 12 regular-season finale against the Chicago Bulls, the Knicks began hunting more shots for Bogdanovic.
It’s something both wings acquired via a pair of in-season trades have dealt with on the fly this season: adjusting to new roles, new teammates, hell, a new coach, after an abrupt end to their stints elsewhere.
Yet this is why you make a mid-season trade, then strike another hours ahead of the February NBA trade deadline.
It’s why you take the gamble and move on from three young players with promising futures.
RJ Barrett, Immanuel Quickley and Quentin Grimes each needed more time and higher usage to develop. A playoff-bound Knicks team battling a rash of injuries needed immediate help.
And it needed a better fit than two players in Barrett and Quickley who provided an offensive spark but were net negatives on the defensive end. Grimes, a capable defender, airing his grievances with his role offensively didn’t help matters, either.
Anunoby and Bogdanovic were equal parts immediate impact and perfect fit.
The Anunoby acquisition improved the spacing and gave the Knicks a legitimate perimeter stopper capable of guarding all five positions on the court.
And adding Bogdanovic, particularly as both Anunoby (elbow) and Julius Randle (shoulder) were set to miss significant time, gave the Knicks more bodies and bolstered one of the league’s worst bench scoring units. The deal wasn’t only a perfect fit for the Knicks. For two seasons in a row, Bogdanovic toiled away on a Detroit Pistons team with the worst record in basketball.
“We are winning the games. We are fighting for something, for the highest possible seed that we can get and then have home-court advantage as long as we can,” Bogdanovic said after defeating the Celtics on April 11. “So it’s a different story and different feeling to be out there.”
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Bogdanovic started 143 out of 144 possible games before his trade to the Knicks. He is the sixth man in New York, even if Mitchell Robinson comes off the bench first. He is the scoring punch the Knicks lost when they traded Quickley to the Toronto Raptors.
Which made it of great importance to get him into a shooting rhythm in the weeks leading into the first round of the playoffs.
Bogdanovic averaged 11.4 points off the bench through eight April games and scored in double figures in five of those games.
For reference, he posted double-digit scoring just five times in all of March against nine games with less than 10 points in the month.
What changed? Bogdanovic gained a better understanding of his role: when he would come into the game in the first quarter, how many minutes he would play on a nightly basis, who would be on the floor with him in those minutes and where he could expect to find his shots.
Eventually, Thibodeau began drawing up more plays to get Bogdanovic involved in the offense. Thibodeau often says the Knicks start things with the end in mind, but said he didn’t intentionally hunt Bogdanovic shots in April to get him into a better playoff groove.
“I’ve been confident,” Bogdanovic said after the April 11 win in Boston. “Even with a lot of up and downs that I’ve had with the Knicks, I’m feeling more comfortable in my role right now. Kind of adjust a little bit because it’s not the same. I’ve been a starter for 10 years, but here going into the playoffs, I hope that I’m starting to play way better and keep my level up.”
Bogdanovic’s impact is largely on offense. He is a 20 point-per-game scorer who has averaged 18 points in each of his last two playoff runs.
Anunoby’s chief impact is on defense, where he’ll be expected to guard Embiid, Maxey and any Sixer in-between.
He will also need to assume a larger offensive role as a swarming Philadelphia defense coached by the creative Nurse targets Brunson, the head of the Knicks snake.
Anunoby’s offense can come in a variety of ways: He’s a dead-eye corner shooter. You can’t leave him open. He’s a smart cutter, too, getting quality offense through the back door. He can put the ball on the floor and score in the mid-range, and if he leaves his feet to dunk the ball, he’s strong enough to finish through contact.
A late January elbow injury cost Anunoby a month-and-change worth of action, but the injury appears to be in the past.
The future holds a first-round playoff matchup between the Sixers and Knicks, and though the focus — and rightfully so — will be on the headliners, the Embiids, Brunsons and Maxeys, it’s where the Knicks improved around the margins — Anunoby and Bogdanovic — who’ll be key in dictating how this series plays out.
“They’re high-character guys, they care about the team,” Thibodeau said of Anunoby and Bogdanovic after the finale against the Bulls. “And that’s important to us as an organization. I think Leon and his staff have identified those types of players, and I think they come in, they fit in.”
MIAMI — The chants started raining down in the fourth quarter. “We want Boston,” the Miami Heat crowd kept shouting, over and over.
The fans got their wish. And a rematch of the last two Eastern Conference finals awaits in Round 1 this year.
Miami — even with Jimmy Butler sidelined for several weeks with a sprained knee — is back in the playoffs. Tyler Herro scored 24 points and was an assist shy of a triple-double, rookie Jaime Jaquez Jr. added 21 points and the Heat grabbed the last spot in the Eastern Conference playoffs by beating the Chicago Bulls 112-91 in a play-in tournament elimination game Friday night.
“I have an appreciation for the things you can’t buy, the things that you have to earn,” Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said. “We had to earn this. You can’t influence it. You can’t pay money for it. You actually have to collectively come together to earn it — and we had to do it the hard way, just to get this first ticket punched for the invitation to this dance.”
Kevin Love scored 16 and Bam Adebayo added 13 for Miami, which is now set to be huge underdogs against a Celtics team that is the big favorite to win the NBA title. The Heat are the No. 8 seed again, just like last year when they survived the play-in and went all the way to the NBA Finals.
“Ultimately, we’ve just got to bring that Miami Heat culture and that toughness,” Jaquez said. “We’ve got two games in Boston. We’ve got to set the tone extremely early, impose our will on them and make it real physical.”
They took control over the Bulls with a 19-0 run in the first quarter, and a 14-0 run midway through the second half ended all doubt. Herro finished with 10 rebounds and nine assists, and the Heat eliminated the Bulls in the last East play-in game for the second straight year.
DeMar DeRozan scored 22 points for the Bulls, who got 16 points, 14 rebounds and five assists from Nikola Vucevic. Coby White scored 13 for Chicago, which was trying to become the fifth team in the last 35 years to make the playoffs after not spending a single day all season over the .500 mark.
Chicago shot only 38%, with the Heat defense carrying the day.
“These games, they’re going to be like that,” Bulls coach Billy Donovan said. “It’s going to be ugly, grind-out. Could we have been better in those areas? Probably. I wouldn’t say we were perfect. I thought our guys were trying to compete.” The 19-0 run — which matched Miami’s longest run of consecutive points all season, done two other times — put the Heat on top, turning an 11-6 deficit into an early 25-11 lead. Jaquez and Nikola Jovic combined for 11 points in the burst, which fueled Miami taking a 17-point lead after one quarter and pushing it to 20 in the second quarter.
It was a rare stretch of decent offense on a gritty, gutty, win-or-gohome night.
The Heat managed only 13 points in the second and still went into the half with a 47-37 lead, because the Bulls were even colder from the field. Chicago started 4 for 5, then went 8 for 39 over the rest of the half. The Heat started 8 for 9, then finished the half by going 9 for 35.
This is how bad it was: Chicago missed 14 of 15 shots in one stretch, while Miami had spans of 0 for 8 and 0 for 6. But the Heat had the two big runs — and now are back as the No. 8 seed, the one they rode all the way to the NBA Finals last season.
It’ll be far more difficult this time against a Boston team that won an NBA-best 64 games this season and is likely still smarting from losing a Game 7 of last year’s East finals to the Heat at home.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to be in the playoffs,” Spoelstra said. “I’m grateful for this locker room to have this opportunity. And I think they’re appreciative of it, as well.”