Giannis Antetokounmpo Embarrassed the Knicks by Scoring 37 Points in Just 21 Minutes
He’s just ridiculous
Twenty-one minutes. That’s all Giannis Antetokounmpo needed to drop 37 points on the Knicks. Well, 21 minutes, 26 seconds, to be exact.
Sure, it was against the Knicks, but it was just another example of how the reigning MVP has managed to step up his game this year. He simply had his way with a hapless Knicks defense, easily gliding past any defender New York put in his way. Julius Randle? Left in the dust. Reggie Bullock? Muscled out of the way. Mitchell Robinson? Euro-stepped.
Giannis was already one of the three most dangerous players in the NBA, and then he came out this season and kicked it to another level. He’s added a three-point shot to his arsenal, attempting 5.1 long balls per game and hitting 33.2% of them. Toward the end of last night’s game, Knicks defenders, sick of getting beaten off the dribble by Giannis, started giving him some room on the perimeter, so he just knocked down some open threes.
“He got to the basket, we put different people on him,” Knicks interim head coach Mike Miller said after the game. “You just saw why they’re the No. 1 team in the East. He’s done that repeatedly. We had some things we wanted to try to do but I don’t know how consistently we did those things to make it more difficult for him.”
Giannis was so dominant in the game (and the Knicks so pathetic) that the Bucks had opened up a 32-point lead by the end of the third quarter. That meant that Giannis could spend the whole fourth quarter glued to the bench and watch his team’s scrubs close out the victory. He finished with 37 points, nine rebounds and four assists in just 21 minutes on the court.
The wild part is, this wasn’t even out of the ordinary for Giannis. The performance was the seventh time this season he’s scored at least 30 points in under 30 minutes of action. He has the most such games in a single season of any NBA player since 1976, passing Stephen Curry, who had six in his 2015–16 MVP season.
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