Get ready. Get ready. No matter how many games you have in the weeks and months ahead, be sure to stay hydrated before each one. Keep a shot glass or two of Malox on hand. The Knicks won the game 111-104, but you had to stare at the score at the end to see it was real, right?
This is what happens. It will look like this. you will survive. you will die You’ll throw a pillow at the TV. If your basement ceiling is low enough, you run the risk of hitting your head. The Knicks are dead. Then they started rolling. Then they died again.
And then they came one last time. Joel Embiid performed a great imitation of Willis Reed throughout the second half, acting primarily as a decoy and doing enough to pull the 76ers back from the brink. The Knicks won 91-90, and the 19,812 people inside Madison Square Garden, who had filled the old gym with vintage roars for two hours, fell silent.
Josh Hart then hit a 3.
Then he hit another one.
Still later, another.
Josh Hart? The heart is a grinder. He’s a hustler. He’s a double-double dynamo. He’s no Stephen Curry. Is he the Knicks’ 3rd-5th preferred option? Their 6th? It didn’t matter. Tonight, he was looking for a shot. He took the shot. The Knicks needed someone to make plays and make shots to take a 1-0 lead in this best-of-seven.
“He was a monster today,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said.
“He stepped up big today,” Jalen Brunson said of his buddy Hart.
He did it. It had to be done. Deuce McBride also had to step up, pouring in 16 points in the first half, scoring 21 points and posting an impressive plus-37 rating. Mitch Robinson did it because he had to, and took advantage of Embiid clearly slowing him down, posting 8 points, 12 rebounds, and 4 blocks, improving his plus-20 for the game. The points were recorded.
Brunson struggled in one of his worst games as a Knick, missing 18-of-26 shots, 5-of-6 threes, turning the ball over five times and looking a step behind on both ends of the floor. However, the Knicks accomplished all of this. The Knicks rarely overcome his minus-3. This time they did. They won’t want to make it a habit.
“It’s a 48-minute game,” Thibodeau said. “The game started slowly, but once the bench came in, everything slowly changed.”
It is interesting. Knicks fans sat on the bench for weeks, worrying that their lead would quickly disappear every time Brunson left a game. Saturday was quite the opposite. Part of that was the Knicks grabbing Embiid’s time on the bench. They outscored the Sixers by 21 points when Embiid was out of the game.
McBride was a big part of that, taking advantage of his first real playoff chance, going 5-of-7 from deep. So was Bojan Bogdanovic, who came up big early in the second half as the Knicks fought back from an early 32-19 hole.
“You have to be ready for that moment,” said Bogdanovic, who had 13 points and seven rebounds in 25 minutes in the top draw. “You never know when it’s coming.”
The Sixers entered the game on a nine-game winning streak and had an emotional 105-104 victory over the Heat in the play-in game, feeding Embiid on nearly every possession. Embiid scored 15 points in the first quarter and looked as healthy as a horse to almost everyone in the Garden peering through hands over their eyes in fear.
Then, his body fell through the glass and fell to the ground. You can see that fear transfer from the Gardeners to Embiid’s own eyes (and as a side note to the fans who cheered when he fell, “Try harder, we’re better”) from the side). He staggered out of the court. The Knicks led by 12 points at halftime.
But Embiid is back. He played 19 minutes in the second half on one leg without a lift. There were zero field goals in the fourth quarter. But he commanded his teammates, especially Kyle Lowry, with determination, scoring 12 straight points to upset the 76ers and bring the Knicks to the brink of crisis.
“I can’t wait to get down to 10 points and start playing,” Hart said after his game-saver 22 points and 13 rebounds. “We’re resilient. I think we just like to be tough on ourselves.”
They averted the crisis. they survived. And so were you. Maybe we’ll do it all over again on Sunday against the Rangers. Perhaps by Monday you’ll be able to experience all of this again: highs, lows, anxiety, joy. It goes like this. It will look like this.
