The Knicks are going to have a problem on their hands.
While Jalen Brunson’s minor ankle sprain appears to have him ready to go as soon as Wednesday night in Dallas, the team will have to manage a longer absence from a player whose contributions are nearly as irreplaceable. For at least the rest of November, OG Anunoby will be sidelined with a hamstring injury, and there’s no guarantee he’ll be ready once December begins either.
I don’t need to tell you what OG brings to the team. He’s the team’s best all-around defender and the glue that holds the unit together on that end. He frequently guards the best scoring wing on the other team and is always in the middle of a momentum-changing play. Not to mention, he was off to an exceptional start from three with career-high volume.
An injury was going to happen at some point. Unless your name is Mikal Bridges, everyone eventually gets banged up. This is especially true for Anunoby, whose 74 games played last season were tied for a career high. While the Knicks’ wing depth has never been especially stout, they had to have known coming into this season that something like this could’ve happened.
Fortunately, as of now, it doesn’t seem to be long-term for the defensive ace, but the Knicks still have games to play in the meantime. The lack of Bam Adebayo and Tyler Herro made his absence not as impactful in the back-to-back games against Miami, but it was especially telling looking at Mike Brown’s rotations in both games.
Without Anunoby, the Knicks leaned heavily on Josh Hart off the bench, starting Landry Shamet and playing a much smaller brand of basketball. They rarely dipped into their bench forwards, leaving just 16 combined minutes for Guerschon Yabusele and one measly minute for Mo Diawara in a brief stint in the first quarter on Monday.
This, along with Mitchell Robinson’s continued minutes restriction, led to less lineup diversity and not a lot of size. Against teams like the Heat, who run a lot of guards and wings around Kel’el Ware with Adebayo out, that might be fine. But going into a game against a team like Dallas? The Knicks will need to get bigger.
The Mavericks boast a large lineup, consisting of the likes of Cooper Flagg, Daniel Gafford, and PJ Washington. If Anthony Davis were healthy, it would be even worse. Against a lineup like that, the Knicks can’t really afford to run small lineups. When Robinson or Towns sat on Monday, the team deployed 3-4 guard lineups.
So, we’re going to have to see some creativity against these bigger teams. The problem is that the Knicks don’t have dependable reserve forwards. Yabusele was supposed to fill that role as someone who could play the 4 and even a suitable small-ball five, but he’s struggled mightily on both ends to start the year. Regardless, Mike Brown is going to have to play him more unless he’s able to play Robinson for longer stretches. You’d be giving up way too much size.
The bigger question, however, is whether this is an opportunity for Diawara or Pačome Dadiet. The young Frenchmen have intriguing tools, but both are raw in a few aspects. Diawara got the brief cameo on Monday and didn’t look bad, so you have to think he might be ahead to play a brief stint in a pinch. Maybe the reason Brown didn’t go back to him was the lack of overall size for Miami? If that’s the case, he could get actual run off the bench against Dallas, where the team will need size to match up on the boards and defensively.
Ultimately, it’s going to be a work in progress, and nothing the Knicks can do will make up for his absence. One thing that’s been a struggle with or without OG has been perimeter defense, so extra effort on the three-point line to stop giving up the open looks that have crushed them all year is a way they can mitigate the loss defensively. A big reason they lost to Miami was the inability to make their own open jumpers, something OG also provides.
Regardless, it’s going to be an increased workload for Bridges, increased opportunity for Shamet and Hart, and increased importance for the team’s best defenders in Robinson and Deuce McBride to make up for what they lose in Anunoby. The question will ultimately be if someone else can step up to provide a bench spark.
