NEW YORK — A sellout Madison Square Garden crowd had its sights set on one player: Desmond Bane, the Orlando Magic star who had drawn the ire of an entire building in the span of two seconds.

There’s just over six minutes left in the fourth quarter of an eventual 106-100 New York Knicks victory over the Orlando Magic, and Jalen Suggs had chased down OG Anunoby to block his fast break layup off the backboard.

Suggs was not whistled for a foul, but Anunoby tumbled out of bounds. The ball did not follow him. Instead, it bounced in a straight line up towards the bottom of the net.

And then, the most unnecessary bit of all hell broke loose: Bane, who was in complete control of his momentum, grabbed the ball and spiked it into Anunoby’s back. Anunoby was out of bounds, so now the ball was, too, off of him.

But Bane’s spike wasn't the average throw to knock the ball off of someone. It was full-throttle volleyball spike from the NBA’s closest thing to a bodybuilder.

“That was one of the funniest things I saw on the basketball court, dog,” Josh Hart said after the game. “I was laughing the whole time. I couldn’t help myself.”

Anunoby immediately rose to his feet and met Bane face-to-face. He shoved the Magic guard as players and officials separate the two from one another.

“When I saw him, he seemed like frustrated,” Mikal Bridges recalled at his locker. “But after a second, he was, ‘Like why did you do that?’ He was just trying to figure out why.”

But Anunoby’s poker face only lasted an instant. Mere seconds after players separated him from Bane, the Knicks star cracked a smile in Bane’s direction.

“I was confused. I was confused at first, and then it was funny,” he later explained at his locker. “I like Desmond, so I’m not mad at him.

“He’s a good dude. It was funny.”

A throw like that, though, from a player built like he eats Mack trucks for breakfast, will certainly leave a mark.

“He had the ball, and then he threw it off me. It was funny,” Anunoby said. “He threw it pretty hard, but it’s all good.”

It’s not all good. Not for the fans who’ve made Bane the new public enemy No. 1 at Madison Square Garden this season. Forget the fact that the Magic have already embarrassed the Knicks twice this year. One of their star players just tried to put a hole through Anunoby's back.

“Yeah after seeing it on the replay a couple times, I knew [the fans] were gonna get mad about it,” Bridges said.

The replay showed on the center-court Jumbotron in slow motion at least five times before officials assessed Bane a technical foul for the play. The fans, however, wanted their pound of flesh. They wanted it back in blood.

So they booed him, mercilessly, every time he touched the ball the rest of the way.

“I don’t think it was gonna escalate, but it was hilarious,” Hart said. “I don’t even think OG was really mad. He was just like, ‘Yo, wassup?'”

Anunoby finished his second game back from a hamstring injury with 21 points and seven rebounds on 8-of-14 shooting from the field and 5-of-7 shooting from 3-point range. His production is a welcome sight for a Knicks team sorely missing his production in the two-plus weeks he spent sidelined due to injury.

“His presence on both sides of the floor. He has gravity on offense and on defense,” team captain Jalen Brunson said. “Not a lot of people have that in the NBA, and he’s one of them.”

Anunoby is back, and he’s back to frustrating opposing wings. Bane finished with 16 points on 7-of-15 shooting from the field, his most impactful play coming from vaulting a ball off the star Knick’s back.

“I couldn’t really see it,” Hart said. “Most of the time I was looking at the replay and trying not to laugh. OG has his moments here and there, but that was hilarious.”

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