PHILADELPHIA – There was a moment toward the end Friday night. The 76ers already had Game 3 in hand, and the Knicks were trying to make them sweat, even if just a little bit. Jalen Brunson drove the lane, used one of his favorite herky-jerky moves, drew a foul.
Joel Embiid disagreed with the call. He said something; it was hard to determine what, exactly.
Brunson responded with a half-smile. Then he did an exaggerated on-the-way up fake – anyone could see he was mimicking Embiid’s signature move, even all the way up in the last row at Wells Fargo Center.
Including Embiid.
He responded with his own exaggerated Brunson, replete with shaking arms.
That was it. That was all. It wasn’t Pete Rose and Buddy Harrelson rolling around in the infield dirt at Shea Stadium in 1973. It wasn’t Maurice Lucas and Darryl Dawkins squaring up with each other like Ali and Ernie Shavers at the end of a Finals game the Spectrum in 1977. It wasn’t Clark Gillies and Terry O’Reilly throwing down their gloves and then throwing haymakers at each other at Boston Garden and Nassau Coliseum in the spring of 1980.
It didn’t have to be. In that moment, a series was born. In that moment, officially, it was clear that these teams annoy each other. You don’t always need bloodshed for a rivalry to hatch. Sometimes all you need are grievances to be aired, and then acted upon, and for more grievance to be piled anew. And we sure have that now.
“This is playoff basketball. It’s going to go up, it’s going to escalate,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said maybe a half-hour after the 76ers had crawled back into this best-of-seven with a 125-114 win late Thursday night.
“And now we’ve got to bring it. My thing is there’s two teams and they responded, now we have to respond. We got to do a lot better, we got to fix it.”
The 76ers weren’t shy about how shabbily they believed they were treated by the officials at the end of Game 2 at Madison Square Garden Monday night. Coach Nick Nurse took all of about 15 seconds to mention that afterward. Embiid waited until his knee was properly iced before offering up his $.02. The Sixers filed an official complaint.
In Philadelphia, this was deemed “appropriate response.”
In New York there was another word for it: “whining.”
Did the Sixers’ incineration of the Game 2 officiating pay dividends? Well, they took 31 foul shots Friday to the Knicks’ 19. That didn’t hurt. Embiid got every ounce the benefit of the doubt when he tugged on Mitch Robinson’s leg in the first quarter and earned a flagrant 1 instead of a flagrant 2; he only scored 44 of his 50 points after that maneuver. Those 44 points, you could say, sure helped Philly’s cause.
Thibodeau decided to be more subtle than Nurse had been three days earlier. But not by much.
“[Brunson] ended up with 12 free throws, right,” he said, “and a lot of those came at the end. So, I will look at it again, and I’ll send my clips in like I do every game. And then they’ll say marginal contact, and then we’ll have marginal contact on Embiid and he’ll be at the line 21 times. That’s the way it works.”
Yep. Everyone’s annoyed. And everyone should be annoyed. The Sixers should be salty that they blew Game 2, and if it made them feel better to insist they were wronged – instead of, say, lamenting a few missed free throws late, or failing to get a rebound late, or not more emphatically calling for time late, that’s their prerogative. And it didn’t exactly backfire on them.
And the Knicks should be salty that they had the 76ers on the run in Game 3, up three at the half with a chance to put the hammer down, and didn’t. And if it makes them feel better to focus on the vagaries of a ref’s whistle, or the fact that Embiid could just as easily have been guzzling Gatorade back in the locker room across the final 40 minutes and 34 seconds of the game? That’s their right, too.
What’s more interesting is the evidence that the Knicks and Sixers are done with the gentlemanly portion of this matchup. They’re both fed up. It made for terrific theater Thursday night. And ought to be just as entertaining Sunday, and beyond.