76ers-knicks provides fireworks COMMENTARY
THE ending — the chaos and collisions and the stones that it took Donte Divincenzo to take that second 3-point shot and make it — is what everyone will remember, but really, it’s only the beginning.
Lawdy, finally, the 76ers and New York Knicks are starting to hate each other. Look at what we’ve been missing.
Joel Embiid can play the heel, and Knicks fans can chant their demands that someone agree to bear Embiid’s children — and do so in a quite vulgar manner, I might add — and Kyle Lowry can play I’m-not-touching-you with Josh Hart like the two of them are brothers bent on annoying each other, and these teams can bump and shove and puff their chests and complain about jagged-edge basketball and the referees’ calls and everything else under the sun, to which the only appropriate response is: Yes. More, please, dear sirs. Give me more.
It doesn’t matter if you care who wins this series, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t. It doesn’t matter if you gasp slightly every time Embiid hits the deck, and it doesn’t matter if you scream every time Jalen Brunson misses a runner in the lane. This is the good stuff.
This is a series for grown men, and right now, the Knicks have more of them. They won Game 2 on Monday night, 104-101. They’re up two games to none, but they have accomplished only what a team with home-court advantage is supposed to accomplish: win on that home court.
This ain’t over, not yet.
This is what playoff basketball is supposed to be, and this is what it has not been between these franchises, these cities and regions, for 35 years. Philadelphia and New York, missing each other every spring since 1989? That’s not right, and damn if the Sixers and Knicks don’t look like they’re making up for lost time. It was always going to be this way, with Tom Thibodeau and Nick Nurse going head to head and clenched fist to clenched fist, with four Jay Wright-prepped dudes from Villanova between the two teams. But the predictable nature of the series doesn’t make it any less compelling. It makes it dramatic as hell.
Those closing minutes, when an NBA postseason game transformed into a scrum in front of an NHL goaltender, the Sixers desperate to move the ball and draw a foul — the Knicks desperate to force a turnover, the officials not at all desperate to call a foul, bodies flying, bodies on the floor, bodies everywhere, and suddenly the ball in Divincenzo’s hands at the top of the key, and the Sixers powerless to stop him from swishing the shot that may have changed this series.
All of it was merely the natural culmination of everything that had happened before it, all of it ugly and beautiful and exhilarating and oh-so maddening.
Parry, riposte? Nope. Forget the refinement. Punch. Counterpunch. Bring on Game 3. The Sixers had better bring their best.