After a full year together, Mikal Bridges and OG Anunoby feel like they’ve reached full comfort with one another.
Trading for Bridges and giving Anunoby a lucrative extension last offseason brought with it the vision that they would be lockdown defenders on the wings.
That wasn’t always the case last year.
But they’ve both enjoyed a strong start to this season.
“I think we have a synergy,” Bridges said after practice Saturday. “It’s just trying to play the right way and doing what we do defensively and trying to make the right play and be aggressive. When it comes down to me and OG, we started to get that synergy. It’s starting to happen. Especially in this defense where we’re shifting and stuff like that. With OG. we’re starting to randomly figure each other out. It sometimes just takes time. No matter how close we are off the court, it takes time defensively. You just need reps. I think it’s starting to come to fruition for me and him. I think it’s just understanding each other.”
It’s rare during the season to have two straight days of practice.
After the Knicks last played on Wednesday, they had three days off before Sunday’s clash against the Nets at Madison Square Garden. Coach Mike Brown gave the team an off day on Thursday before practicing Friday and Saturday.
“You usually don’t have practice time like this so you try to take advantage of it as best as possible,” Brown said Saturday. “There’s a lot that we still need to clean up and get better at, and we’re trying to introduce things slowly. A lot of it I didn’t do during the preseason. We just played out of our foundation so that they could start understanding how to play the game of basketball on both sides of the floor and not rely on any tricks or anything like that.”
Sunday will mark the fifth time the Knicks and Nets play since the Bridges trade.
The Knicks won all four matchups last season.
“I think every time I play [them], I just think about how my life changed when I got there,” Bridges said. “When I got traded from Phoenix to there, just how my life changed from that situation. Had a great time [with the Nets]. Obviously, we were losing games the last year I was there. But never take it for granted the time I had there, the connections I had and built with the young guys who are there now that I was teammates with, a couple of rookies that I had, they were there, they’re still there. Sean Marks and all them, Andy [Birdsong] and all those guys, they’re great dudes. Joe Tsai, Claire [Tsai], all of them, I built a lot of relationships.”
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