Fans weren’t the only ones who were quickly all-in on the idea.
“Pretty cool. Pretty cool, I just hope he’s 100 percent OK to play,” head coach Nick Nurse said before the game. “We were joking around about that yesterday. I said, ‘Are you going with (Kurt) Rambis or Kareem or Horace Grant?’ And he said, ‘None of those, I gotta get some good ones.'”
Those are stretch comparisons for the 21-year-old Anunoby, and Nurse wasn’t entirely sure, upon reflection, that Anunoby even knew those names. Anunoby didn’t let on to his coach if he didn’t and later said “of course” he knew Abdul-Jabbar, who last played eight years before Anunoby was even born. He knew Grant, too, and Bo Outlaw, who was another popular comparison. Anunoby had a more modern comparable in mind in the event he needed to find a long-term fit. Glasses from the 70s, 80s, and 90s wouldn’t do.
“Naw,” he said. “(Amar’e) Stoudemire.”
There was a small issue with that first pair, though, because they wouldn’t stay on. They were too loose, and Anunoby couldn’t get comfortable in them. So McCullough tried a second pair, fashioned a strap out of athletic tape to go around the back of Anunoby’s head to keep them in place.
Anunoby’s pregame warmup showed no obvious discomfort. Like last year, his scheduled warm-up time falls right in a dead spot for media duties, and so I’ve seen a lot of Anunoby shooting workouts the last year and change. His performance from beyond the arc last year was statistically strong enough to change the opinion of that tool (he’s started the season 3-of-8 on threes, a tiny sample right in line with his 37.1-percent mark from his rookie season), and he spent the offseason working to speed up his release and make it more repeatable. Friday’s workout was evidence of that good progress, with more wrist in his shot instead of the arm carrying the bulk of the load, Anunoby getting the ball a little higher, and his release in general looking more compact. In that controlled, opponent-free environment, Anunoby seemed just fine in the second pair.
Those ones felt a little better, too, and so Anunoby took the floor with them against the Celtics. In doing so, he became the latest in a line of Raptors to require temporary headgear that includes Cory Joseph, Patrick Patterson and, most famously, Hedo Turkoglu.
