Mike Lupica: Joel Embiid, 76ers hit back in Game 3 and now Knicks must respond

A lot of things in sports can be true at once, and right now there are a lot of things true about what is turning into a rock fight between the Knicks and 76ers, starting right here:

The Knicks have been hit now, mostly by Draymond Embiid, not just low where Embiid got Mitchell Robinson’s legs, and not just in a place slightly higher, where Embiid hit Isaiah Hartenstein with his knee. The Knicks all got hit Thursday night when they had the chance to bury the Sixers and did not.

That is one truth as we look ahead to Game 4 in Philly on Sunday afternoon. Another, and an obvious one, is that Joel Embiid, if he did have the kind of priors Draymond Green does, would have gotten Flagrant 2’d and gotten good and ejected for pulling Robinson down the way he did. The Knicks, and their fans, have a right to yell their heads off about dirty play, and how the refs blew it. But so, too, did the refs blow it at the end of Game 2. No fouls, including flagrant ones in Game 2, lots of harm.

But perhaps the most lasting truth of what we’ve seen in this series so far is that on Thursday night, when the Knicks really could have finished off the Sixers, they let a guy with a bad leg use his good one to kick them from one end of Broad St. to the other in the second half of Game 3, a half that included the 76ers rolling the Knicks for 43 points in the third quarter.

Tom Thibodeau was remarkably subdued on Thursday night (despite doing a tremendous job with his messaging) about Embiid and the free throw disparity his team encountered on the road, a lament as old in the playoffs as the Jersey Turnpike.

When the subject of flagrant fouls and Embiid was raised, Thibodeau drily asked, “Which one?” But then Thibodeau told a truth of his own when he simply said, “We gotta do better.”

To his team’s credit, it did not simply start looking ahead to Game 4 after Embiid and the Sixers seemed to make every shot they took in the third quarter. Jalen Brunson was back to doing Brunson things, on his way to a 39-point night. Josh Hart contributed 20 more points, six rebounds, six assists, continuing to play like a star. And the Knicks were still hanging around in the fourth quarter in a game the Sixers should have long since put away, getting the lead down to eight before some bad turnovers, one of them committed by Brunson.

But the story of this game, in all ways, was Embiid: Because what was clearly the cheapest of shots on Robinson; because Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN reported that Embiid has been suffering from a case of Bell’s palsy; mostly because the former MVP of the league, even as he still looks as if he’s sometimes walking in a swimming pool, became only the third player in history to score 50 or more against the Knicks in a playoff game. Michael Jordan was the last to do it, 31 years ago (Sam Jones of the Celtics did it in 1967). Was Embiid helped mightily by getting to shoot 21 free throws, and making 19? If you saw the game, you know that he was. It doesn’t change the fact that he got to 50 and, for the one night, one his team desperately needed, he looked like the guy who could get an MVP award away from Nikola Jokic.

And, just like that, everybody moved on from one of the best playoff endings, in Game 2, any Knicks team ever had, and one of the worst the Sixers have ever had, the Knicks scoring the last eight points, in the last half-minute, to win. That was a Larry Johnson of an ending at the Garden, with some Reggie Miller thrown in, the Knicks doing to the Sixers what Reggie had done to them once when he scored the last eight at the Garden, in even less time than the Knicks did it last Monday night.

One thing is for certain: When this thing does return to New York and to the Garden next week, Embiid will hear it from the crowd the way Reggie did in the old days, when he became Public Enemy No. 1 with Knicks fans, when it was the Knicks and Pacers who had the kind of bad blood we are now seeing from these two teams this week.

Put it another way: Even though the Knicks didn’t get the Heat in the first round, this series has turned into the same kind of blood feud we used to get from those two teams in the old days, when it was Jeff Van Gundy holding on to Alonzo Mourning’s legs and not Embiid hanging on to Robinson’s.

The 76ers got hit at the end of Game 2, especially with a huge call, in plain sight, not made against Tyrese Maxey, and the timeout the refs didn’t give Nick Nurse that might have changed everything. An ending like that, even in the second game of the series, could have ended the 76ers if they let it. They did not. They got back up when they got back home, even though they were still trailing the Knicks at halftime.

Then a great player who had made a dirty play in the first half simply did great things in the second. The Sixers and their fans stopped by the outrage factory after Game 2. Knick fans made the same stop after Game 3. Game on. Mike Tyson was the one who said everybody’s got a plan until they get hit. We see on Sunday what kind of plan the Knicks have against a guy — Embiid — who turned into the baddest man on the planet Thursday night.