Cade Cunningham went around Mikal Bridges, crossed Mitchell Robinson and then dove all over Karl-Anthony Towns.
He flexed for a moment and yelled at the crowd at Madison Square Garden for sucking the life out of him.
While he shared a floor with Jalen Brunson, this time it wasn’t even close who was the best player on the court.
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 drubbing of the Knicks on Thursday night, leaving New York at 0-3 against Detroit on the year.
Most troubling, OG Anunoby was the Knicks’ primary defender on Cunningham and offered virtually no resistance, especially during a third quarter in which Cunningham took control of the game.
He scored 11 straight Pistons points during one stretch in that third quarter.
Cunningham shot 57.1 percent when Anunoby was paired with him, according to NBA Courtside tracking stats.
Knicks coach Mike Brown tried Josh Hart and Jose Alvarado on Cunningham later in the fourth quarter, but the results weren’t much different.
Anunoby left before the locker room was opened to the media.
“He can do a lot for a man of his size and puts teams in difficult situations with the things he does, because your man is really [6-foot-2]6-1 and sitting on a guy who’s 6-7, who does it,” Brown said of Cunningham. “And you give him a little bit of an edge. Most of the time, the small forward isn’t used to navigating the things he does on the floor.
When the Knicks made a mini-run to cut the deficit to 12 points with just under five minutes remaining, Cunningham drilled a step back to ease what little tension remained in the arena.
One of the Knicks’ biggest defensive adjustments before the All-Star break was keeping the ball off center and forcing it toward the sideline.
But Cunningham forced them to return to bad habits.
“We want to try to keep the ball off the middle of the floor,” Brown said. “And we didn’t do that well. We let him get to the middle of the floor a lot. And when he got to the middle of the floor, he hurt us. So we have to do a better job of keeping the ball on the sideline and keeping it from getting into the middle of the floor.”
Anunoby missed the final four games before the All-Star break with a right toenail avulsion.
His entire toenail has been removed and he is still in pain, he said earlier, because it is still an open wound.
And Thursday was a nightmarish return to court.
Aside from 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 were just 8-for-35 from deep.
“We did a great job creating some wide-open looks, especially from the three-point line,” Brown said. “They just didn’t go in tonight.”
No, they certainly didn’t.
However, it seemed like everyone from Cunningham did that, especially against Anunoby.
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