The Knicks are better than the Sixers in every way. Oh, and New Yorkers took over the Wells Fargo Center.
Yes, the Knicks are tougher, but from the top of their roster to the bottom, they’re as talented as the Sixers, if not more so.
The sequence that sank the 76ers on Sunday afternoon, that may have swung this first-round series toward the Knicks for good, captured everything that has separated these teams through four breathtaking and bloodletting games.
Nico Batum rose up to dunk the basketball early in the fourth quarter, and Josh Hart met him at the highest points of their leaps and blocked him cleanly. At the court’s opposite end, Jalen Brunson, just having reentered the game after spending a few minutes in the locker room with some kind of injury, lofted a rainmaking fadeaway floater over Joel Embiid to give the Knicks a three-point lead. Everything else that happened inside a rowdy and raucous Wells Fargo Center was immaterial, at least symbolically. Those two plays, back-to-back, said everything necessary about the Sixers’ 97-92 loss in Game 4, about the three-games-to-one deficit they now face, and the task ahead of them if they want to save their season.
» READ MORE: Sixers sit one loss away from elimination after 97-92 Game 4 loss to Knicks
It has become an oft-repeated assertion throughout this series that the Sixers are the more talented team but the Knicks are tougher. Through four games, though, in light of Brunson’s remarkable performance Sunday — 47 points, 10 assists — that assertion is only half-true. Yes, the Knicks are tougher, but from the top of their roster to the bottom, they’re as talented as the Sixers, if not more so in this sense: They have more players capable of contributing to their success. They have better balance.
They didn’t have center Mitchell Robinson on Sunday — he missed the game with an ankle injury — and they won without him. Hell, they outrebounded the Sixers by 10, and they held Embiid to his worst game of the series: 27 points, just 19 shots, 12 misses. Brunson took the game over. Hart didn’t make a shot from the field yet was a pain in the Sixers’ rump all day: 17 rebounds, five assists, that dunk block of Batum. OG Anunoby had 16 points and 14 boards himself, a 6-foot-7 swingman making like Charles Oakley. Playing like that, in this kind of game … that’s talent, too.
“Once we get rolling, their coaches call time out to slow us down,” Sixers guard Cam Payne said. “But it shouldn’t matter. We should still find a way to keep our pace going. They’re sending their guys to crash, and all we’ve got to do is make sure we get the rebound and try to push and be aggressive. Their half-court defense is solid. They’ve got a lot of guys helping. We need to find a way to keep running.”
The shame in Sunday’s outcome is that the series is likely to be shorter for it. Game 4 was exhausting and exhilarating to watch, and what has made this series great is easy to see. It’s the proximity of the two franchises, the antipathy between the two fan bases, the cross-market familiarity with the players — everybody in New York knows Embiid and Kyle Lowry, and everybody around here knows the Knicks’ Villanova guys — and the knife-fight style of basketball each team has been willing, even eager, to play.
The atmosphere inside the Wells Fargo Center was unlike that of any other important Sixers postseason game in recent memory. The place has been louder before: 1999, when the Sixers returned to the playoffs after a seven-year absence; 2001, throughout that enchanted run to the Finals; 2012, when they upset the top-seeded Chicago Bulls. But this was a different kind of loud. There were so many Knicks fans that the noise was continuous. There were no pauses in it, no silence at all, and sometimes it felt as if the crowd had turned entirely against the Sixers.
“Kind of [ticked] me off,” Embiid said. “I don’t think that should happen.”
Well, it did, and it neutralized some of the Sixers’ home-court advantage. “I don’t put much stock in that,” coach Nick Nurse said. “Can win here. Can win anywhere.” Except the pivot points for a series like this can be so small, and an arena that is usually one of the most challenging for a visiting team was much more hospitable to the Sixers’ opponent Sunday. The stakes felt higher for that environment, and now, for the Sixers, they are.
What has made these games great is everything that the NBA for too long had not emphasized. The league has been about individual stars and Twitter/X trends and bubbling gossip over which teammates and opponents get along with which. This matchup isn’t about any of that. It’s about something deeper and more demanding, and the Knicks have more players with more of the qualities fit for those moments than the Sixers. It’s that simple. The better team is winning. And come Game 5 on Tuesday night, it will probably win again.