Before the season, a Toronto Raptors victory over the New York Knicks hardly would have qualified as news. The Knicks were coming off of a lottery season. The Raptors looked like an ascending contender. But based on just the last several weeks? Toronto’s 113-106 victory over New York at Madison Square Garden qualifies as one of the season’s bigger upsets.
The Knicks, behind Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle, had won eight straight games entering Wednesday’s clash. The Raptors, feeling the weight of their limited depth and starting to hear trade rumors involving their best players, had lost six in a row. But those few valuable Raptors were more than enough on Wednesday as Toronto snapped New York’s league-best winning streak behind one of the more lopsided performances within a single team you’ll ever see.
Three Raptors combined to score 95 of Toronto’s 113 points. Unsurprisingly, those Raptors were OG Anunoby, Fred VanVleet and Pascal Siakam, who led the way with a career-best 52 points and amazingly managed to score 17 straight Raptor points to end the third quarter.
The rest of the team scored just 18 points, and that allowed the Knicks to hang around and very nearly swipe the game. New York even led 102-101 with roughly two minutes to play, but some clutch shot-making down the stretch as well as a key Malachi Flynn block of Immanuel Quickley sealed the victory.
Toronto’s depth remains a problem. Rookie of the Year Scottie Barnes has scored just eight points on 4-of-19 shooting in Toronto’s last two games, and both Siakam and VanVleet topped 40 minutes yet again in the victory. The Knicks, meanwhile, looked fairly strong in defeat. Randle and R.J. Barrett each scored 30, and the defense held up surprisingly well overall in the absence of Quentin Grimes. While there were individual outliers, the overall trends dictating each team’s season largely held. But for 48 minutes on Wednesday, the Raptors reminded the basketball world what was so tantalizing about their talent in the first place, and in the process ended one of the NBA‘s most impressive recent streaks.