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Chris Herring, ESPN Senior Writer
New York Knicks forward OG Anunoby will miss Friday’s Game 3 of the Eastern Conference semifinals with a strained left hamstring, the team announced Thursday.
Sources told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Anunoby is considered unlikely to play in Sunday’s Game 4, as well. Anunoby was evaluated before the team left for Indiana on Thursday and that assessment was to continue Thursday night.
He suffered the injury late in the third quarter of the Knicks’ Game 2 victory over the Indiana Pacers, when he was planting his leg in an effort to convert a transition layup. He was in immediate pain following the play, and Jalen Brunson was forced to commit a foul to allow Anunoby an effort to sub out and hobble his way to the locker room.
Brunson (foot) is listed as questionable for Game 3.
Anunoby, who had scored a playoff career-high 28 points at the time of the injury, has averaged 46 minutes per game for the short-handed Knicks in the four contests leading up to Game 2. His playing time marked the most minutes he’d ever played in a four-game window, according to ESPN Stats & Information research.
Anunoby, one of the league’s finest defenders, has been an enormous difference-maker for the Knicks since being traded to the club from Toronto in late December. New York’s sterling mark of 100.9 points per 100 possessions allowed with Anunoby on the floor — a stat that would have been the best in the NBA on a team scale — was 14.1 points better than when he was off. Between the regular season and playoffs, the Knicks have gone 26-5 so far with him in the lineup.
His injury is the latest for the Knicks, who this week lost backup center Mitchell Robinson for the next six to eight weeks with an ankle injury, last week lost Bojan Bogdanovic for the season following wrist and foot surgeries and earlier in the campaign lost two-time All-NBA forward Julius Randle for the season after he suffered a shoulder dislocation.
