The Sixers are dog tired. So what? They have lots on the line and no excuses left.

NEW YORK — Kelly Oubre looked like he had just stepped off the catwalk at Milan, which was quite the achievement, considering. He wore pine-green leather pants, a red and black mesh shirt under a brown leather jacket, and sunglasses.

The glasses were for fashion — not, unlike his teammate Joel Embiid, for function. Of course, Oubre had health issues to contend with Tuesday night. Bell’s palsy just wasn’t one of them. He had missed the 76ers’ morning shootaround with an illness, the same flu, he said, that Tyrese Maxey had dealt with last week. Such is life. It’s the playoffs. Everyone’s sick, hurt, or tired.

“I feel like dog water right now,” Oubre said after Game 5 against the Knicks, that crazy 112-106 Sixers victory. “But even dogs drink it.”

» READ MORE: Tobias Harris comes up big, Buddy Hield’s advice for Tyrese Maxey, and other Sixers takeaways from their Game 5 win

The question for the Sixers isn’t whether they showed guts Tuesday night in staving off elimination. (They did.) It isn’t even whether Oubre’s dog-water analogy made any sense. (It did … I think.) It’s whether they can summon that same effort, or an effort close to it, on Thursday night for Game 6.

And the answer to that question is … uncertain at best.

Mostly, the Sixers won Game 5 because of Maxey. More than mostly, actually. If he hadn’t scored seven points in less time than it takes to soften a stick of butter in a microwave, he and his teammates would have been crammed into the visitors’ locker room at Madison Square Garden, giving their what-might-have-been, see-ya-in-the-fall interviews to the media. Instead, Embiid got away with committing nine turnovers and playing as sloppy a game as a superstar can play. He’ll have a second chance to show that — even on one leg and with half a face — that he is capable of meeting the measure of a big-game moment.

Instead, here we are, noting the welcome contributions that Oubre and Tobias Harris made to stretch this series. Oubre, as lousy as he felt, still had 14 points and four rebounds and kept up the terrific defense he has delivered throughout these five games, and Harris was about as good as he has been or by now should be expected to be in a playoff game: 19 points, 7-of-11 from the field, eight rebounds.

If you’re still waiting for Harris to wake up to the fact that he is a max-contract player, that he has the intelligence and size and all-around skills to assert himself on offense more frequently than he does, you’re going to be bummed for the little time he likely has left with the Sixers. He is who he is, inherently deferential, sometimes passive, and he’s not changing now, especially since he said that Nick Nurse and the rest of the Sixers’ coaching staff aren’t asking him to do anything more than he already is.

» READ MORE: Tyrese Maxey has his Reggie Miller moment against the New York Knicks | David Murphy

“Every game, I watch film religiously on how we play and different opportunities out there, and I’d be the first to tell you I’m not passing up opportunities,” he said. “I do make the right basketball play, and sometimes that may be turning down a shot to get somebody else a better shot. If that is criticized as not being assertive, I would just say that’s always how I’ve played basketball. …

“There are some opportunities from time to time where I see that maybe I could, but during this playoff stretch, it isn’t like, ‘You’re turning down 10 shots a game.’ No. Maybe one or two. Like I said, I stay balanced. Night to night, teams are going to guard us in different ways, and you take advantage of those opportunities.”

The Sixers are probably going to need more from Harris in Game 6 than just that go-with-the-game-flow approach. As wonderful as Maxey has been in this series, asking him for another 46-point night or something close to it is not a sound strategy for getting to a Game 7. And the Sixers can’t afford for Harris to vanish completely or for Oubre to get squirrely, as both can and sometimes do. Truth be told, there’s a good reason to think they won’t.

An often-unspoken source of motivation among these three key players — Maxey, Harris, Oubre — is maybe the most powerful for a professional: money. Franchises like to sell fans on the sweet sentimentality of athletes playing for the love of the cities they represent, and fans like to be sold on that idea. But the reality here is that Maxey is playing for a hefty contract extension — one that the Sixers put off giving him last summer — and Harris and Oubre will be free agents this offseason.

“It’s big,” Oubre said when asked how great a factor such considerations were at this time of year. “The hunger is there. We want to win. We understand that everything happens when you win and you play together as a team.”

That’s a lot of incentive to fight through the fatigue, the injuries, the illnesses, the pressure of a superstar’s legacy and public perception, and everything else that elite athletes deal with in these games that matter most. The Sixers left Game 5 spent, and they’ll have to summon that amount of energy and more on Thursday night. They don’t have a choice but to start drinking another round of dog water, and no one will want to hear an excuse if that dish doesn’t end up bone dry.

» READ MORE: After Game 4′s New York invasion, Dawn Staley urges Sixers fans not to sell their Game 6 tickets