Cade Cunningham got around Mikal Bridges, crossed up Mitchell Robinson then dunked all over Karl-Anthony Towns.
He flexed for a second and yelled at a Madison Square Garden crowd that he was sucking the life out of.
Sharing a floor with Jalen Brunson, this time around it wasn’t even close who the best player on the court was.
He probably won’t win it this year, but Cunningham looked like an MVP.
He finished with 42 points, 13 assists and eight rebounds in the Pistons’ 126-111 thrashing of the Knicks on Thursday night, moving New York to 0-3 against Detroit this year.
Most troublingly, OG Anunoby was the Knicks’ primary defender on Cunningham and provided almost no resistance, particularly during a third quarter in which Cunningham took over the game.
He scored 11 straight Pistons points during one stretch in that third quarter.
Cunningham shot 57.1 percent when Anunoby was matched up with him, per NBA Courtside’s tracking stats.
Knicks coach Mike Brown tried Josh Hart and Jose Alvarado on Cunningham later in the fourth quarter, but the results were not much different.
Anunoby left before the locker room was opened to the media.
“He can do a lot for a guy his size and puts teams in predicaments with the stuff that he’s doing because really your guy is [6-foot-2], 6-1 and is on a guy who is 6-7 doing it,” Brown said of Cunningham. “And you’re putting a small forward on him. Most of the time the small forward isn’t used to navigating the stuff that he does on the floor.”
When the Knicks made a mini-run to cut the deficit to 12 points with just under five minutes left in the game, Cunningham drilled a stepback trey to remove any little suspense that was still lingering in the arena.
One of the Knicks’ biggest defensive adjustments before the All-Star break was keeping the ball out of the middle and forcing it to the sidelines.
But Cunningham forced them back into bad habits.
“We want to try to keep the ball off the middle of the floor,” Brown said. “And we didn’t do a good job of it. We allowed him to get to the middle of the floor often. And when he got to the middle of the floor he hurt us. So we have to do a better job of trying to keep the ball on the sidelines and not allowing it to get to the middle of the floor.”
Anunoby missed the last four games before the All-Star break with a right toenail avulsion.
He had his entire toenail removed and is still in pain, he said previously, with it still being an open wound.
And Thursday was a nightmarish return to the court.
Other than his defensive no-show, he had a brutal shooting night.
He recorded just eight points on 3-for-13 shooting from the field and 1-for-8 shooting from 3-point range.
As a team, the Knicks went just 8-for-35 from deep.
“We did a great job of generating some wide-open looks, especially from the 3-point line,” Brown said. “They just didn’t go in tonight.”
No, they certainly didn’t.
It seemed all of Cunningham’s did, however — particularly against Anunoby.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
