Please Enjoy This Clip of OG Anunoby Winning a Dance-Off at the 2015 Maui Invitational

He was made for basketball’s biggest stage.

OG Anunoby’s hard-nosed defense at Indiana jump-started his route to NBA immortality. | Trevor Ruszkowski-Imagn Images

Long before the NBA title with the Raptors, long before the All-Defensive teams and steals title, long before one of the most famous shots in the history of the NBA, Knicks forward OG Anunoby was a college freshman with airtight dancing ability and a dream.

The dust has settled on New York’s 107–106 win over the Spurs Wednesday in Game 4 of the NBA Finals, the greatest single-game comeback in the history of that event—and a comeback sealed by Anunoby’s tip-in of guard Jalen Brunson’s missed three-pointer with under two seconds left. However, the legend of Anunoby is just beginning, and Game 4 provided an opportunity to revisit his origins.

College Basketball Reference tells us that the son of Nigerian immigrants to England made his collegiate debut for Indiana on Nov. 13, 2015 against Eastern Illinois. We’re not concerned with that, though. We’re concerned with what happened when the Hoosiers decamped for the Maui Invitational a week and a half later.

At the 2015 Maui Invitational with Indiana, Anunoby won his first championship: a championship of dancing

Indiana athletics has preserved the video on YouTube for posterity. It’s the banquet on the Sunday before the tournament, a dancing competition is underway, and only two competitors are left standing: Anunoby and Kansas forward Carlton Bragg. The music for the final is unmistakable—“Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)” by Silentó. And Anuboy, to the delight of even Bragg, absolutely crushes it.

His stoicism, a trait that’s followed him deep into his NBA career, is there, too (though he grins at a couple points). Watch the hilarious video here.

Anunoby’s Indiana career was short, but he showed flashes of the player he’d become for the Raptors and Knicks

In 2016, Anunoby’s freshman year, the Hoosiers went 27-8 and boasted five future NBA players. They earned a No. 5 seed in the NCAA tournament and beat Chattanooga and Kentucky before losing in the Sweet 16 to North Carolina.

Anunoby played in 34 of 35 games for Indiana, averaging just 13.7 minutes per game. Despite limited playing time, he made his mark with 4.9 points, 2.6 rebounds, 0.5 assists, 0.8 blocks and 0.8 steals per contest. He cracked double figures on five different occasions, including a season-high 14 against the Mocs.

“He’s very unassuming in the sense that I don’t think he has any idea how good he’s going to be,” Hoosiers coach Tom Crean told Alex Bozich of Inside the Hall in 2015—an understatement.

Anunoby appeared ready to take on more responsibility in 2017, and in the first two-ish months of that season he churned out highlight after highlight. A double-double against Liberty. A 21-point game against Mississippi Valley State. A quartet of blocks against Delaware State. Seven—seven!—steals against Rutgers.

And then came Penn State. In a 78–75 Hoosiers win, Anunoby suffered a knee injury that ended his season—and his Indiana career with it. The Hoosiers, their fortunes already flagging before the injury, finished 18-16 and fired Crean.

As it turned out, Indiana’s loss was Toronto’s gain. With a pick they received from the Bucks for guard Greivis Vásquez in June of `15, the Raptors took Anunoby 23rd in the draft, and the road to two championships seven years apart began.

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