His head bowed, his shoulders slumped, his hands shielding the glare from the camera lights circled above him, Joel Embiid sat at his locker and ripped the officiating and said it didn’t matter anyway because the Sixers were going to win the series.
Other than that, it was a ho-hum ending to a ho-hum night.
“We’re going to win this series,” Embiid said after the Sixers watched a five-point lead dissolve in a wild 30 seconds that were equal parts controversial and devastating. “We’re going to win this. We know what we have to fix. We did a better job today, so we’re gonna fix it. We’re the better team, so we’re going to keep fighting.”
Knicks 104, Sixers 101.
Knicks 2, Sixers 0.
Forget the Process. The next couple of days will be The Processing.
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They fought. Give them that. Give them all of it. Were the Sixers better in Game 2? Are they better overall? Even if they are, do they really have the wherewithal to pull off the impossible? To win four of five games in a playoff environment? Against an opponent that has the motor of a rabid squirrel and the endurance of a zombie?
Just because the big man says so doesn’t make it true.
But they fought. He fought. They lost the battle, and suffered a huge setback in the war. When they walk into the Wells Fargo Center for Game 3 on Thursday night, they should do so with heads held high.
It’s rare to be able to say that after watching a team blow a lead it held for two-and-a-half quarters and another it held with 30 seconds left. That’s the shame of it, really. The to-do list was as long as it was precarious after a 111-104 loss in Game 1. The Sixers spent Game 2 checking off the boxes.
They boxed out and corralled loose balls. Two days after the Knicks outrebounded them 23-9 on the offensive glass, the Sixers held them to a 12-10 advantage in Game 2.
They got back in transition and harassed at the finish. In Game 1, the Knicks outscored them 27-11 on the fastbreak. In Game 2, the Sixers had a 14-10 edge.
They won the field goal percentage game, from two-point range and deep.
Most significantly, the Sixers exploited their truest advantage. They turned the game over to their two superstars and both lived up to the name. Tyrese Maxey scored 35 points with 10 assists. Embiid had 34 and six. They were the clear victors against the Knicks resident — and deserving — MVP candidate. Jalen Brunson finished with 24 points and six assists on 8-of-29 shooting, thanks in large part to a herculean late-game defensive effort by Tobias Harris.
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Embiid and Maxey shined in the exact moments and situations where a team most needs to rely on its horses. Late in the third quarter, the tide appeared to have shifted irrevocably. A seven-point lead at the end of the first quarter became a four-point lead at halftime which became a one-point deficit with 16 minutes to go in the game when Brunson got himself to the low block for a Brunsonian bank shot. Not long after that, three minutes into the fourth quarter, Bojan Bogdanovic came off the bench to hit a couple of threes and put the Knicks up eight. The Garden was rocking so loud your Apple Watch wouldn’t stop buzzing with notifications of concern for your health.
They looked done. Chests heaving, legs jellied. The Knicks had somehow found another shooter to roll in off the bench. The Sixers looked as done as they do now that it is finally over.
“They just keep bringing all these guys in who can shoot the three and they are just firing them,” head coach like Nurse said. “Like, they are not even that open sometimes and they are making them.”
Nurse pinpointed Bogdanovic’s threes — one off-balance with a defender in his grille, the other in transition — as the difference in the game. It looked that way at the time, and would eventually bear itself out. But first came a valiant — and ultimately tragic — rally by Embiid and Maxey. The duo combined for 16 points over the game’s final eight minutes. Maxey’s 28-footer with 1:09 left gave the Sixers a 100-96 lead. It grew by one more point. Then, it evaporated.
The pivotal sequence began with 27.1 seconds left. Brunson hit a three-point shot to the cut the Sixers lead to two. The Knicks pressed the subsequent inbounds pass. Nurse tried to call timeout once before the ball went in to a double-teamed Maxey. He tried again as Maxey fought through a grab and some further contact to control the ball. The whistle never blew. Maxey ended up on the ground. The ball ended up in Knicks possession.
“Unacceptable,” Embiid said. “Tyrese got fouled a couple of times. We just had the same thing happen in the game against Miami. That’s just unacceptable to put us in that situation. That’s [bleeping] unacceptable to lose a game like this, especially in the playoffs.”
“Everybody on the floor was trying to call a timeout, myself included. Nico, the coach on the sideline, but they didn’t give it to us. But forget about the timeouts. There was a bunch of fouls. LIke I said, that’s [bleeping] unacceptable.”
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Nurse’s view was much the same.
“We look at getting it in quick, I call a timeout, referee looked right at me, ignored me,” the Sixers coach said. “It went in to Tyrese. I called timeout again. Then the melee started.”
It’s impossible to judge the refs’ decision-making without being down on the court and witnessing the sequence of events in real time. It isn’t impossible to say that Maxey was fouled before and after the inbounds pass. The whistle should have blown.
It didn’t, and the Sixers have to live with the ramifications. You can’t blame a loss like this solely on the officiating. The Knicks played more than well enough to win.
The Sixers know this. Deep down inside, they have to. The first two games of this series have shown that the Knicks are very much for real. They are exhausting, maddening, infuriating, soul-sucking, a relentless drain on mind, body and spirit. They are a team that any hard-core basketball fan would love to be able to root for. They will be America’s team against the Bucks and Celtics.
If the Sixers can somehow rally to prevent it, they will have accomplished the greatest feat of the Embiid era. It would be easier to believe if they had a complete team. A third scorer. Or a couple of dogs with three-point touch like Josh Hart and Donte DiVincezo. Or a guy off the bench like Miles McBride. They haven’t had any of those things in the first two games of this series. There is your major difference.
The Sixers do have two games at home. They have two superstars who showed they can carry a team down the stretch after getting knocked down to the mat. Thus far, it hasn’t been enough.
