Really liked reading this one
https://nypost.com/2024/01/11/sports/how...
How the Knicks' OG Anunoby trade echoes their historic Dave DeBusschere deal
Stefan Bondy
OG Anunoby is not Dave DeBusschere.
That is not what I’m saying. I couldn’t possibly, in good conscience — and no matter how difficult it is to resist recency bias and dismiss the players I’m too young to remember — tell you Anunoby belongs in the same stratosphere as a top-75 all-time player.
Plus the Knicks, when they traded for DeBusschere in 1968, were further along the path to a championship. They didn’t realize it at the time, of course. But they had all the pieces in place, including a point guard waiting to break out into superstardom.
And as that stylish point guard explained when I approached him last week with my idea for this piece, DeBusschere was the final piece for Red Holzman’s Knicks.
Tom Thibodeau’s Knicks, Clyde Frazier added, need another trade. Anunoby is the piece before the piece.
Fair and probably true.
The Knicks look like world beaters with Anunoby, but five games is too small a sample size to make grand proclamations about championship contention.
Knicks forward Dave DeBusschere, acquired in a franchise-altering 1968 trade, puts up a shot from the corner. Getty Images
Again, that’s not the point of this story. This is about the strategic impact of the two mid-season trades, set almost exactly 55 years apart with very similar reverberations down the respective rosters. It’s about dominoes falling in all the right places.
Let me explain further.
At the start of the 1968-69 season, the Knicks, as award-winning filmmaker Dan Klores told me recently, had too many offensive-minded players. There was talent, but it was a bad fit with poor spacing and players out of position.
Walt Bellamy, a center and former All-Star, needed the ball and clogged the middle. Howie Komives was a chucker guard off the bench. Neither had much interest in defense.
They were sent to Detroit for DeBusschere, a defensive demon who was so smart — and such a leader — he was named the Pistons’ player-coach at 24 years old.
DeBusschere’s addition gave the Knicks somebody to guard the opposition’s elite wings and frontcourt players — whether Billy Cunningham or Gus Johnson or Connie Hawkins — but the larger impact is what the shakeup did for the rest of the roster.
Willis Reed moved from power forward to center. That worked out well. His subsequent MVP award and two Finals MVPs can attest to that.
Walt Frazier elevated his game following the acquisition of Dave DeBusschere and helped lead the Knicks to two titles. Focus on Sport via Getty Images
Frazier went from averaging 26.2 minutes in the 25 games before the trade to 42.6 minutes for the remaining 46 games. Sounds like a winning formula. The shots and opportunities with the ball were redistributed heavily toward the best players, specifically Frazier, Reed and Dick Barnett.
DeBusschere, meanwhile, was highly effective playing off the ball, elevating the Knicks’ defense while adeptly knocking down jumpers from the corner.
Sound familiar? Just replace DeBusschere with Anunoby, plus swap out Bellamy and Komives for RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley.
“Where the improvement lies is the similarities: more spacing, better defense, less guys need the ball,” said Klores, the director of the documentary series, “Basketball: A Love Story.”
“It’s unfair to compare OG to DeBusschere. But it’s correct that he helps the team in the same ways as DeBusschere.”
The DeBusschere impact was immediate, if you remember. The Knicks beat Bellamy and the Pistons by 48 points in DeBusschere’s first game, then captured 13 of their next 14.
Jalen Brunson has adapted to his extra responsibility after RJ Barrett and Immanuel Quickley were dealt for OG Anunoby. Getty Images
Now it’s Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle leading a five-game winning streak for the Knicks, largely with increased responsibilities after the departures of Quickley and Barrett.
The sample is small but utterly dominant. Anunoby’s plus-minus through 164 minutes is a ridiculous +115, a record for a player’s first five games with a new team. Not even DeBusschere could claim that number.
“There have been times in all sports where a late-season and in-season trade is made, and the team catches on fire. So I hope and pray to God, also Allah, that this is it,” Spike Lee, the most famous of Knicks fans, said recently. “And he doesn’t need the ball. He can shoot from the corner. And his D is stifling. Rebounding. He can play anybody 1 through 5. You can put him on Giannis, you can put him on Tatum. And he’ll nullify them.
“We’re still one piece away, though,” Lee added. “So I’m very anxious to see what Mr. [Leon] Rose is going to do. We all know we have a stockpile of draft choices. And people are saying, ‘What are you waiting for? What are you waiting for?’ Well, he knows better than me. He’s the team president. But I hope this is not the end with OG.”
Lee didn’t want to identify his ideal target — “I don’t want to jinx it, they still blame me for Reggie Miller,” he said — but he’s hopeful for “orange-and-blue skies.”
Knicks fans such as Spike Lee understand OG Anunoby isn’t the final piece of building a title contender. Charles Wenzelberg/New York Post
After all, it’s been 50-plus years since DeBusschere, Frazier, Reed, Barnett and Earl Monroe gave the Knicks their last championship.
“I loved that team. We’re due,” Lee said. “Fiddy years. F-I-D-D-Y. That’s how we spell it in Brooklyn.”
Swings of Leon
Speaking of in-season trades, give credit to the silent team president for pulling off some highly productive swaps in his four-year tenure.
In 2021, the Derrick Rose trade propelled the Knicks to the fourth seed. In 2023, the Josh Hart deal catapulted them to the franchise’s first playoff series win in a decade.
Now there’s Anunoby.
It’s not quite on the level of the DeBusschere or Monroe trades, but it’s certainly better than other in-season deals of the past 25 years: Stephon Marbury and Penny Hardaway coming from the Suns in 2004, Tracy McGrady coming from the Rockets in 2010, Iman Shumpert and J.R. Smith for Lance Thomas and Lou Admundson in 2015.
The big trades involving Kristaps Porzingis (2019) and Carmelo Anthony (2011) also were completed during the season. Grade them how you will. I still think the Knicks could’ve done a lot better with Porzingis.
‘D’ mattered in IQ trade
Emptying my notebook on the Anunoby trade, I can share a few items:
The Knicks wanted to get big, which was a concern as their defense plummeted in December.
My understanding is that while Quickley’s defensive rating is strong, Thibodeau wasn’t a believer the statistic held up for the guard.
Why? Quickley can defend point guards, but he can’t guard wings and in the NBA there are a bunch of wing-sized players who play point guard (ahem, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander).
In the second-to-last game of Quickley’s tenure in New York, he was playing exceptionally on offense against the Thunder, but was subbed out with four minutes left because of a size disparity on defense.
Emblematic and prophetic.
The Knicks lost the game, and completed the trade three days later.
So there was a concern the Knicks needed to get bigger on the perimeter for defense. It’s also not new from Thibodeau, who was giving minutes to stronger guards Alec Burks and Elfrid Payton over Quickley in years prior.
And Quickley, while highly valued for his offensive production, became the conduit to Anunoby because RJ Barrett’s contract (with four years and more than $100 million remaining) was viewed as a negative asset.
“There was only one real taker,” a source said, referring to Barrett’s hometown team in Toronto.
