NEW YORK — Among the many talents gathered in his titanic structure, it seems that Isaiah Hartenstein has a gigantic gift for understatement.
“There was a lot going on, to be honest,” the Knicks center said after New York survived Game 2 — and there really is no other word for it, or at least no more accurate descriptor — to take a 2-0 lead. at the 76ers in a physical, intense and exciting best-of-seven opening round series.
That, friends, is a extremely contained and sober summary of that:
Jalen Brunson – he of the 15-of-54 shooting line during the first 95 and a half minutes of this series – tries to hit opposite number Kyle Lowry, only to end up on the floor in a heap. As soon as the ball goes to Donte DiVincenzo, Brunson gets up and runs to the corner for a 3-pointer; he has to fake and side-step a hard-hitting Tyrese Maxey just so he can take it out, and watches it bounce hard off the rim and go straight up… before gently falling through the net, drawing the Knicks within two, and separating what must have been about 4 billion synapses firing in his brain down to a single thought.
“Get a steal,” Brunson said after the game. “Do whatever it takes to pull off a robbery. Find a way.”
The path: Teaming up with Josh Hart and wrapping around Maxey in a tightrope walk that ended with the Sixers’ All-Star point guard – which was a game-time decision due to illness and who ended up playing a tough 44 minutes – unable to handle Lowry’s inbounds pass.
“I just tried to grab the ball,” Maxey said. “I mean, I’m just trying to catch the ball and throw it down the field. It was difficult for me to catch him. I had to sweep, I came out, jumped up there and caught the ball again. I tried my best.
His efforts ended with him and the ball on the deck. Hart – the type of player that Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau says “gives the team toughness, real toughness” and just “makes things happen” – came out with the loose ball and kicked it to DiVincenzo, waiting alone on the left wing, waiting for his chance to be the hero…
…and he ripped it off the back of the rim.
“It felt like I missed the first one, to be completely honest,” DiVincenzo said.
He was able to call it “the first,” because — on a night when Philly had largely resolved the box-out problems that contributed to the Knicks regaining a monstrous 51% of his own shots in the Game 1 victory – no one in red hit the body of our 7-foot underestimator. Like Brunson, he found his thought process reduced to a sharp, fine point.
“Go get the ball. Go get the ball,” Hartenstein later told reporters. “I mean, it was kind of instinct. I feel like sometimes when you – as strange as it sounds, stop thinking and let the game play, then you’ll get things like that.”
“I was really hoping Isaiah would get it,” said DiVincenzo, who bounced back from a Game 1 that saw him lose playing time to backup guard Deuce McBride by scoring 19 points with four rebounds, three assists and two steals. “Because I knew it, [with] the rotation of everything, I was going to take a second look. So, thank God he got the offensive rebound.”
“You know, we practice this every day – dagger 3s and second chance 3s,” he later added. “So since O.G. [Anunoby] I get it, I just prepared and, you know, live with the results. Trust the work I did.”
Thibodeau likes to say that the magic is in this work; on Monday night at Madison Square Garden, he produced a shot that is among the most magical in the last 30 years of Knicks basketball.
DiVincenzo’s redone serve – which generated a extremely rare double hit by Mike Breen, just to underline the gravity of the situation – putting New York ahead. With 13.1 seconds still on the clock, Philadelphia had a chance to turn all the euphoria running through MSG into nothing more than ash in the mouths of Knick fans.
Maxey, who scored 15 of his game-high 35 points in the final frame, got the ball in the backcourt, gaining strength to attack a Knicks team that could barely stay in front of him. even for a fraction of a second in the second half. A back screen from Joel Embiid caught Anunoby retreating, giving Maxey a mile-long runway to shove the ball straight down Hartenstein’s throat. Except …
… Hartenstein’s fourth block of the game preserved the lead. Anunoby’s free throws at the other end put the Knicks up two points. A last-chance 3 from Embiid popped up, leaving the Garden in hysterics — and the 76ers back in Philadelphia in an 0-2 hole.
The Sixers, for their part, are outraged at how they got there — specifically their inability to get a timeout on the fateful inbounds play that ended with DiVincenzo’s dagger.
“The first thing is, obviously, they score, we’re going to try to do it quick,” Sixers coach Nick Nurse said after the game. “Us no get in quick. I call timeout. The referee looked directly at me and ignored me. It went to Tyrese, I called timeout again. Then the confusion began.”
“Unacceptable,” Embiid said as he sat in the Sixers’ locker room, head down. “Tyrese suffered some fouls, we just had the same thing happen against Miami with Tyler Herro. It is simply unacceptable to put ourselves in this situation. It’s unacceptable to lose a game like this, especially in the playoffs.”
Frustrated with the timeout not granted and numerous other calls and non-calls, the Sixers reportedly intend to file a complaint with the league office regarding the officiating in the first two games of the series.
It remains to be seen whether the complaint would have any tangible impact on the actual progress of the series, which saw Embiid, even while dragging a left leg that is clearly less than 100%scoring 63 points in 76 minutes, passing the ball well and acting as a great deterrent for the Knicks to get into the paint, and Maxey, despite battling an illness that he said left him unable to move on Sunday night and feeling pain and chills, take every Knicks defender off the rebound en route to 34 points and seven assists per game on shooting splits of 54/40/100.
They were the two best individual players in this series. (With the possible exception of Hart, who scored over 20 points and 10 rebounds in both games, who played the full 48 minutes on Monday – evidently Thibs doesn’t tell jokes – and who, after failing to make four 3-pointers in a single game during the regular season, has now done so in both Games 1 and 2.) And still, the Sixers go home down 0-2.
Nurse preferred a tight eight-player rotation, with only Nicolas Batum, Buddy Hield and Paul Reed playing real minutes off the bench. (Cameron Payne had two and a half minutes of burn time in Game 1, but didn’t take the heat off in Game 2.) These three backups combined to score 17 points on 18 shots in two games — precisely the point production that starting forward Tobias Harris introduced. Kelly Oubre Jr., whose point-of-attack defense on Brunson has been sensational, has 14 points on 14 shots.
Philly’s third-best player in this series, by a considerable margin, was 38-year-old Lowry… who fell into what seemed like serious pain on DiVincenzo’s game-winning triple, with his leg bent awkwardly beneath him under the basket. If he is in any way limited when the stage shifts to Philadelphia for Game 3 on Thursday, the Sixers’ options — for complementary ballhandling, for accurate shooting, for implementing the defensive game plan that made him fall from Hart to Brunson’s style cramp in the midfield – become even more limited, precisely at the moment when they need to find their best form to avoid being pushed to the limit before the postseason is a week old.
They are not at the limit yet; all New York did was maintain service and protect the home court. Out loud, yes. But Philly — with whatever Embiid percentage they have, with Maxey running around the Knicks’ perimeter defense, with players hopefully shooting more comfortably after sleeping in their own beds — can still recover.
“We’re good. We’re going to win this series,” Embiid said. “We’re going to beat this. We know what we need to fix. We did a better job today, so we’re going to fix it. We’re the better team and we’re going to keep fighting.”
The Sixers will have to do it, because the Knicks are ready to come together — and unlike injured Philly, they’re getting contributions from all sides of the roster. All five Knicks starters scored in double figures in Game 2, and the benches of McBride, Bojan Bogdanović and Mitchell Robinson continued to provide quality minutes.
Beating them will require Philly to bring the fight… and if Game 2 taught us anything, it’s that they’ll need to do that for the full 48 minutes.
“I know I say this ironically, that writers always think the game is over – I Never I think the games are over,” Thibodeau said. “And it shows: you can make up ground very quickly. You know, a 3 goes in. You get a steal. You get three more. They miss a couple. And the next thing you know, the game changes. This is how quickly it can change.”
And while most of the magic is in the work…perhaps some of it comes from elsewhere.
“You need good luck,” Thibodeau added. “Sometimes the ball bounces your way.”
