BOSTON — Mohamed Diawara picked up the slack for an absent OG Anunoby.
With Anunoby sidelined for a second straight game because of a sore toe, Diawara became the Jaylen Brown stopper in the second half of Sunday’s 111-89 Knicks victory over the Celtics.
It earned Diawara, the second-round rookie, his first defensive player of the game award, which is given by the Knicks coaching staff after victories.
“You get a guy like Jaylen Brown who is a heck of a player. In the first half he was having his way with us a little bit. He was 6-for-11, he was rolling,” coach Mike Brown said. “In the second half, we did a better job defensively as a team. I got to give Mo some credit. Mo was our defensive player of the game. We threw Mo on him for a little bit. We thought we’re going to try to make Jaylen work, be physical, get up into him, stuff like that, and he did it without fouling. He did a nice job with it. So to see that from a young guy at this point in his career was a lot of fun as a staff.”
In addition to his defensive prowess, Diawara was perfect from the field — 4-for-4 overall, 2-for-2 from deep — while scoring 10 points.
The Knicks outscored Boston by 22 points in Diawara’s 27 minutes.
“I think the beginning of the year, training camp, everybody was like, ‘He’s gonna be good,’ ” Josh Hart said. “And I think with him, it was just more about getting more comfortable, more experience, more minutes, those kinds of things.
“But he’s gonna be extremely good. He’s extremely talented, defensively he can be all over the place but offensively he’s knocking down shots.”
Karl-Anthony Towns returned from a one-game absence for a laceration above his eye.
The Knicks center said the cut — which occurred in last week’s double-overtime victory over the Nuggets — required 16 stitches.
Towns also wore goggles for the first time in his career, revealing the black-rimmed set is the same model used by Amar’e Stoudemire — and still stored by the Knicks.
But they didn’t last long.
Towns removed the goggles in the second half. He also struggled with just 11 points on 3-for-9 shooting, including no 3-pointers and three turnovers.
