OG Anunoby has seen championship joy in two of basketball’s loudest markets, and he’s got a clear winner.
After experiencing both Toronto’s 2019 title parade and New York’s celebration this past season, the former Raptor said the crowd scene in Toronto still stood above the rest. In an interview with Greg Cally of Sports Illustrated, Anunoby was asked how the New York parade differed from the one in Toronto, and he pointed to the way the streets filled up north of the border.
"New York had everything blocked off. In Toronto, everyone was just in the streets," Anunoby said.
"Toronto was much more condensed than this one."
Both parades were estimated to have drawn more than two million people, though exact totals are impossible to pin down since neither event was ticketed. Still, Anunoby’s view adds a little extra weight to the long-running debate over which city threw the bigger celebration.
Anunoby was part of Toronto’s championship run in 2019, even though an emergency appendectomy at the end of that season kept him out of the entire playoffs. He later spent parts of seven seasons with the Raptors before being traded to New York in December 2023 for RJ Barrett, Immanuel Quickley and a second-round pick.
The 29-year-old then played a much larger role in the Knicks’ title march, and he capped that run by setting a single-postseason record for the highest field-goal percentage in NBA history with at least 150 attempts, shooting 67.2 per cent.
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