Sixers look to respond from officiating errors, 2-0 hole

CAMDEN >> The challenge for 76ers point guard Tyrese Maxey Monday night wasn’t to put out of his mind the disheartening final seconds of a 104-101 Game 2 loss to the New York Knicks. It was to get his mom to.

Usually, Maxey’s used to having to talk his dad down. But when he and the Sixers returned from Madison Square Garden, site of several confirmed refereeing errors in the final seconds that helped the Knicks turn a 101-96 deficit into a 2-0 series lead, Maxey had found his peace with the final sequence. His mom, on the other hand …

“I was the one calming my mom down,” Maxey said Wednesday morning at the Sixers training facility. “It was funny. It was like, mom it’s OK, you’ve got to let it go.”

That’s the team-wide challenge ahead of Thursday’s Game 3.

The 76ers are in a 2-0 hole after back-to-back tight ballgames in New York. They led the Knicks in the fourth quarter of each, none more dramatically than seeing New York rattle off the final eight points to steal Game 2.

But dwelling on the losses won’t do them any good Thursday night at the Wells Fargo Center.

Coach Nick Nurse followed his customary process of letting the disappointment hit and then putting it aside.

“Clock hit midnight after that game, and I moved on,” he said. “I always give it till midnight, and I move on.”

Tuesday’s disclosure by the NBA of refereeing mistakes — that the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson had grabbed Maxey’s jersey; that Josh Hart made contact in what should’ve been a foul that caused a Maxey turnover with 16.1 seconds left; that Nurse should’ve been given a timeout when signaling frantically in the ensuring scramble before Donte DiVincenzo’s go-ahead 3-pointer — did little to reopen the wounds.

The NBA’s report didn’t change the fact that the Sixers did enough to win Game 2, or that they led Game 1 for four minutes of the fourth quarter before a 111-104 loss.

“Stuff happens,” Nurse said. “I’ve been in a lot of games, and stuff happens. I thought we played really well. I thought we played well enough to win. Obviously, the closing seconds of the game cost us the game. However it went down, it went down. Nothing’s going to change that now.”

Maxey took in the NBA officiating report as a modicum of validation, given that he was at the center of the missed calls.

But he knows that nothing the team does Thursday will retroactively win them Game 2.

It’s all about the next 48 minutes of basketball and getting on the board in the series.

“I think what it did for us is give us reassurance,” he said of the report.

“We’ve got to use that and put it as fuel to the fire. It is what it is. We’re down 2-0. If we dwell on it, we’re going to be down 0-3. But we can’t dwell on it. We’ve got to go out there and do what we know we’re capable of doing.”