On Saturday, the New York Knicks have a chance to close out the franchise's first NBA championship since 1973. It has been a hard-fought series against the Spurs that has included some drama along the way, but a dagger from forward OG Anunoby completed an insane second-half comeback for the Knicks to put them on the brink.
Anunoby has been overlooked during the Knicks' run to the NBA Finals. New York has some household names with Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns, but it has been Anunoby's consistent scoring that has allowed the Knicks to make relatively short work of every postseason opponent not named the Hawks. Not only has this run seen the prices of Anunoby's rookie cards go up exponentially, but it has also seen the news that Anunoby was quite the baseball card collector resurface.
OG Anunoby reveals he grew up collecting baseball cards and is a big New York Mets fan 🔥
— Topps (@Topps) June 11, 2026
"He listed Carlos Delgado as one of his favorites to watch... He also liked José Reyes, Pedro MartÃnez and, essentially, the entire Mets roster of the late 2000s."
(via @TheAthletic) pic.twitter.com/iAZya5BXJd
OG Anunoby may be starring in the NBA playoffs, but he began as a baseball card collector like so many of us
This is incredibly relatable. So many collectors, regardless of their current sport preference(s), started collecting baseball cards as kids because they were the easiest cards to find for a long time (and now as well, but for very different reasons). Knicks fans had to be eating up Anunoby's explanation that he was a diehard Mets fan, although the Yankees fans among them probably had some mixed feelings about it.
This also wasn't a situation where a guy becomes a "fan" of a big-market team with star players that are worth a bunch of money to collectors. Anunoby was out there rooting for some pretty terrible Mets teams and collecting Carlos Delgado and Jose Reyes. Sure, the Pedro Martinez cards he collected have a chance of being worth something, but Anunoby was collecting for the sake of collecting, and that is delightful.
Unfortunately, it does sound like that Anunoby is almost "all basketball, all the time" these days and that he isn't really collecting anymore. Hopefully, that isn't the case, and he has only shifted his card interest to the sport where he is on the brink of being a champion. If Anunoby collected his own cards early like many athletes do, that investment is probably looking pretty great right now.
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