OG Anunoby probably knows the feeling of dunking well.
He can dunk whenever he wants. He can dunk on Tuesdays, Christmas, Leif Erikson Day. If the sophomore forward wants to jump a few feet and place the basketball in the cylinder, he has the capability to do so.
On Wednesday against North Carolina, Anunoby went up to catch the ball on a lob from junior guard Josh Newkirk. Watching the way he leapt and then floated can only be described as a religious experience. With his right palm, he stopped the ball in mid-air. Then he viciously threw it through the rim.
You could call it a dunk, but that doesn’t seem to do it justice.
Call it a dunk the same way you call Christian Watford’s buzzer-beater against Kentucky just a shot.
As Anunoby started to soar, it didn’t seem possible he could come down with it. He shouldn’t have been able to catch that. Human beings can’t do that.
Anunoby played two minutes in the second half of the IU-Fort Wayne game. The Hoosiers lost that game. Against North Carolina, Anunoby was everywhere: in position consistently on defense, moving the ball on offense and making clutch and-ones when the Tar Heels began to make a run.
Nothing else he did matched the energy and jubilation of that dunk.
Twitter exploded in the way Twitter does. Even a few press members, including yours truly, had to hold back an involuntary screech.
The play will be seen on SportsCenter in the morning and will surely make its rounds across the Hoosier internet, as it should. It was a once-in-a-lifetime play that symbolized the Hoosiers’ rise.
Anunoby’s renaissance is similar to former guard Victor Oladipo’s. Seemingly out of nowhere, both players have been a tremendous part of IU’s return to its former glory.
He’s still a work in progress. He sometimes drifts in and out of games, gambles a bit too much and can use work driving off the catch. But that dunk showed how high Anunoby and the rest of the Hoosiers can go.
It took place in the first half, and there was plenty of basketball left to be played — yet that play will be what lasts.
Anunoby didn’t dunk. He created a moment, a moment that fans will share together for as long as Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall stands.
And then a few years after that.
gigottfr@indiana.edu
@gott31
