Knicks' bench mob keys wild NBA Cup championship

New York will hoist a banner-like object after their thrilling win

Whew! The NBA Cup delivered on Tuesday night, as the New York Knicks beat the San Antonio Spurs in a closer-than-it-sounds 124-113 championship match.

“Damn, don’t it look good to see ‘Champions’ on a shirt?” asked Towns in the post-game. It sure does, and it should!

Congrats to all you Knicks fans reading this. As Jonathan Macri said, don’t feel bad for feeling good. Every team in the league wanted to win this, and only New York did.

How they did it was somewhat surprising, though. While Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns had their share of big plays, the victory was really won by OG Anunoby, a trio of bench players, and Mike Brown.

Let’s work through some of my scattered game notes:

— Anunoby was the best player on the floor, particularly during an electric 20-point first half. His game-high 28 points, including a dagger three we’ll talk more about in a second, were overshadowed only by his ferocious defense. Anunoby only got credit for one block, but he altered a bunch of shots with timely help and consistently put ballhandlers in jail:

Jalen Brunson won Cup MVP for his overall body of work, but to me, Anunoby was the MVP of the night.

— Arguably the biggest storyline of the game was one we talked about extensively in our preview yesterday: Mitchell Robinson’s killer offensive rebounding.

The Knicks’ big man made me look smart by annihilating the Spurs on the glass with 10 offensive rebounds himself and several other uncredited tips to teammates.

Remarkably, six of Robinson’s clean-ups happened in the fourth quarter alone. When the going got tough, Robinson got tougher.

He repeatedly punished the Spurs by stationing himself in the dunker spot or even directly under the basket. Defenders like Wembanyama had to stay in front of him or else be standing out of bounds. That meant that when a shot went up, Robinson was either already in position or could simply bulldoze any nearby Spurs out of the way:

Luke Kornet was a little more successful battling Robinson than Wembanyama, and I’m surprised that coach Mitch Johnson didn’t try the two-big pairing at all. If Johnson had to do it again, I suspect we’d have seen a lot more French Vanilla lineups.

— Wembanyama, playing on a minutes restriction, looked mostly out of sorts aside from a flurry of jumpers in the third. He even missed a few (difficult) lobs. Defensively, he was quite effective still, but he ended the night with a game-worst -18 compared to Luke Kornet’s +7. Given Robinson’s dominance, that isn’t a coincidence. Nate Duncan of the Dunc’d On podcast noted that nine of Robinson’s 10 offensive rebounds came in the 12 minutes shared with Wembanyama; he had just one in the six minutes he battled Kornet instead.