It earned Diawara, the second-round rookie, his first defensive player of the game award, which is given by the Knicks coaching staff after victories.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"Mohamed](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/user-expressly-acknowledges-agrees-downloading-120731648.jpg\")
Mohamed Diawara guards Jaylen Brown during the Knicks-Celtics game on Feb. 8, 2026. NBAE via Getty Images<\/p>\n
\u201cYou get a guy like Jaylen Brown who is a heck of a player. In the first half he was having his way with us a little bit. He was 6-for-11, he was rolling,\u201d coach Mike Brown said. \u201cIn the second half, we did a better job defensively as a team. I got to give Mo some credit. Mo was our defensive player of the game. We threw Mo on him for a little bit. We thought we\u2019re going to try to make Jaylen work, be physical, get up into him, stuff like that, and he did it without fouling. He did a nice job with it. So to see that from a young guy at this point in his career was a lot of fun as a staff.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to his defensive prowess, Diawara was perfect from the field \u2014 4-for-4 overall, 2-for-2 from deep \u2014 while scoring 10 points. <\/p>\n
The Knicks outscored Boston by 22 points in Diawara\u2019s 27 minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the beginning of the year, training camp, everybody was like, \u2018He\u2019s gonna be good,\u2019 \u201d Josh Hart said. \u201cAnd I think with him, it was just more about getting more comfortable, more experience, more minutes, those kinds of things.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut he\u2019s gonna be extremely good. He\u2019s extremely talented, defensively he can be all over the place but offensively he\u2019s knocking down shots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Karl-Anthony Towns returned from a one-game absence for a laceration above his eye. <\/p>\n
![\"Karl-Anthony](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/user-expressly-acknowledges-agrees-downloading-120728602.jpg\")
Karl-Anthony Towns wore goggles for the first time in his career. Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Knicks center said the cut \u2014 which occurred in last week\u2019s double-overtime victory over the Nuggets \u2014 required 16 stitches.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Towns also wore goggles for the first time in his career, revealing the black-rimmed set is the same model used by Amar\u2019e Stoudemire \u2014 and still stored by the Knicks.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tWhat\u2019s happening on and off the Garden court\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSign up for Inside the Knicks by Stefan Bondy, a weekly exclusive on Sports+.\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\tThank you\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
But they didn\u2019t last long.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Towns removed the goggles in the second half. He also struggled with just 11 points on 3-for-9 shooting, including no 3-pointers and three turnovers.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BOSTON \u2014 Mohamed Diawara picked up the slack for an absent OG Anunoby. With Anunoby sidelined for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3768],"tags":[7,75,304,6,1136,191,3810,3806,9,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-591823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-knicks","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-boston-celtics","10":"tag-knicks","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-knicks","14":"tag-newyork","15":"tag-newyorkknicks","16":"tag-nfl","17":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116038853069375424","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}