Some guys win a championship and spend the whole summer replaying it. OG Anunoby is not one of those guys, and the Knicks ought to be glad about that. As the man himself put it, the title run was special, but he's already turned the page toward next season.

Rewind for a second, though, because what Anunoby did during that run deserves more than a shrug on the way to training camp. Here is a player who has spent his whole career being the guy nobody wants to guard and nobody wants to be guarded by. The corner threes, the dead-eye catch-and-shoot, the defensive assignments that read like a who's-who of the league's best scorers. Then the playoffs hit and he started making the kind of shots that decide franchises.

If you're a certain age, you remember what a two-way wing meant to a title team. Think of the guys who never led the team in scoring but led it in peace of mind. James Worthy in Los Angeles, Dennis Johnson in Boston and Seattle, Kawhi Leonard before he was THE Kawhi Leonard in San Antonio. Anunoby is cut from that same cloth. He doesn't need the ball to affect the game, and when he does get it in a big moment, the moment usually shrinks.

That's what made his postseason matter. Heroics is the word the headline used, and it fits. There were shots in the fourth quarters of tight games that turned a nervous building into a loud one, stops on the other end that turned a loud building quiet. The Knicks had been searching for that kind of player since the days when the Garden was the loudest building in basketball and a certain type of toughness was the entry fee. Anunoby brought it, the city fell in love, and now there's a banner in the rafters to show for it.

And now he wants to move on. Good.

I've seen the other approach, the one where a team spends October reliving June. It never ends well. The 1987 Lakers came close to falling into that trap after the '87 title, and Pat Riley famously guaranteed a repeat just to keep their eyes forward. The great ones treat a championship as a floor, not a ceiling. Anunoby talking about next season before the summer's even cold? That's the mindset that got them to the top in the first place.

There's a practical side here too, and my colleague Dave Morgan would want me to mention it. The Knicks' rotation is going to get picked apart by every opponent with a clipboard. Defending champs get everybody's best shot, and Anunoby's workload, all those minutes chasing the other team's best player every night while still being asked to score, adds up. How Thibodeau's replacement or continuation handles that load will tell us a lot about whether this team can do it again.

But that's a problem for October. In August, the story is simpler. A guy who helped carry a franchise to its first title in over fifty years is already back in the gym, treating the parade like it was last week's game film. You watch the tape. You file it. You get better.

The Knicks waited more than half a century for a night like the one Anunoby helped deliver. That he's hungry for another one already might be the best news New York has gotten since the final buzzer.