OG Anunoby referred to Pascal Siakam earlier this week as \u201cone of my great friends in the league,\u201d but as they say, with friends like this, who needs enemies?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Siakam has torched the Knicks \u2014 and his former Raptors teammate, specifically \u2014 in the first four games of the Eastern Conference finals, with 30 points in 35 minutes Tuesday night helping the Pacers grab a 3-1 series lead.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It marked the second game of at least 30 points against the Knicks for the three-time All-Star forward, who registered a team-high 39 in Indiana\u2019s Game 2 victory<\/a> at the Garden.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pascal Siakam celebrates as OG Anunoby (bacground) looks on during the second half of the Knicks\u2019 Gamer 4 road loss to the Pacers. AP<\/p>\n Entering Game 5 on Thursday night back at MSG, Siakam leads the Pacers with a scoring average of 25.8 points, and he\u2019s connected on 54.1 percent of his field-goal attempts and 50 percent (6-for-12) from 3-point range, including 3-of-4 in Game 4. <\/p>\n He also has consistently gotten to the free-throw line, attempting a team-high 24 in the series, while converting 17 of them (.708).\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOh yeah, Pascal is a great player,\u201d Anunoby said between the two games in Indiana. \u201cJust after that Game 2, just trying to make it as difficult as possible. Maybe not help as much in certain situations and not give him easy looks or their shots.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJust try to make it as difficult as possible and force him into uncomfortable possessions. Pascal is one of my great friends in the league. We were very close as teammates. He\u2019s a great player and a great person, but we\u2019re competing right now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In 27:32 with Anunoby as his primary defender \u2014 by far the most minutes among the Knicks \u2014 Siakam has scored 27 points on 9-for-20 from the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pascal Siakam shoots a 3-pointer over OG Anunoby during the fourth quarter of Anunoby netted his series high Tuesday night with 22 points, along with three steals and two blocked shots, but he missed 6-of-7 tries from long range.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe second half [of Game 3] wasn\u2019t to our standards,\u201d Siakam said, \u201cand we came back with more energy and played Pacers basketball. We know we will give ourselves a chance every night if we play that way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The Pacers acquired the 31-year-old Siakam from Toronto in January of last season, sending out Bruce Brown, Kira Lewis, Jordan Nwora and three first-round picks in a three-team trade with the Raptors and the Pelicans.\u00a0<\/p>\n Follow The Post\u2019s coverage of the Knicks in the 2025 NBA Playoffs<\/p>\n Sports+ subscribers: Sign up for Inside the Knicks<\/a> to get daily newsletter coverage and join Expert Take<\/a> for insider texts about the series.<\/p>\n Siakam added that Tyrese Haliburton \u201cwas everywhere\u201d in posting a triple-double with 32 points, 15 assists and 12 boards with zero turnovers. He also joked that his All-Star teammate \u201cstole a lot of my rebounds, but I\u2019ll let that go,\u201d after finishing the game with five for the third time in the four games.\u00a0<\/p>\n After patiently answering several questions about Haliburton and the Game 4 contributions of teammates Aaron Nesmith and Bennedict Mathurin, the 6-foot-8 Siakam finally took a question about his not-to-be-overlooked performance.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cYou ain\u2019t gotta ask about myself, man, it\u2019s all about my team,\u201d Siakam interjected. \u201cJust taking what the defense gives us and again, trying to be aggressive. I know, like, the playoffs, this is a big moment for everyone, after the game, look at the boxscore, everyone is running to that, like, how many points did this person score?\u00a0<\/p>\n Pascal Siakam drives on OG Anunoby during the first quarter of the Knicks\u2019 Game 4 road loss to the Pacers. Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cBut that\u2019s not us. It\u2019s gonna be different people on different nights. It\u2019s been that for the whole year and that\u2019s all we really care about. Every time we come in here, and if we have a \u2018W,\u2019 I\u2019m good. I\u2019m sleeping well. So that\u2019s my mindset going into this, and that\u2019s been the mindset of our team, and it\u2019s going to continue to be like that for us to be successful. It\u2019s not a me thing, it\u2019s an us thing, and I\u2019m just glad to be able to help.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OG Anunoby referred to Pascal Siakam earlier this week as \u201cone of my great friends in the league,\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":62927,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3768],"tags":[7,304,6,11,197,1136,191,3810,3806,741,279,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-62926","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-knicks","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-nba-playoffs","12":"tag-nba-playoffs-2025","13":"tag-new-york","14":"tag-new-york-knicks","15":"tag-newyork","16":"tag-newyorkknicks","17":"tag-og-anunoby","18":"tag-pascal-siakam","19":"tag-sports"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114588808915965767","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62926","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=62926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62926\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
the Knicks\u2019 Game 4 loss to the Pacers. Charles Wenzelberg \/ New York Post<\/p>\n