PHILADELPHIA — The easy thing is to feed the beast. There is some rawness and some rancor in this series now. There are some hard feelings and some hurt egos. The Knicks are a team forged by ferocity, tempered by toughness, and now there is a silly sense in the air that if they don’t get even with Joel Embiid, Corleone-style, that maybe they aren’t as stolid as we thought.
There is too much at stake to get dragged into this nonsense. There is the work of a season on the table right now, and if the Knicks are still in the better spot than the Sixers, up 2-1 and halfway to the second round, that can all go poof with 48 minutes of folly and foolishness Sunday.
“You adjust to how the game is being called,” coach Tom Thibodeau said Saturday afternoon, 24 hours before the Knicks and the 76ers would meet for Game 4 of what is beckoning an increasingly heated and entertaining series. “It’s not an easy job, I understand that. I just want consistency. So if it’s good, hard competition, great.”
That ought to be enough. In some precincts, it isn’t enough. In those precincts — the same ones where, in summer, there is routine demand for fastballs thrown at heads every time a batter is brushed back — they want more. They want Thibodeau to summon Jericho Sims, or some such member from the back of the Knicks’ reserves, and get even with Embiid for his borderline ejection-able (and undoubtedly objectionable) take-down of Mitchell Robinson on Friday night. Any method of payback is fine in those corridors of conspiracy — a tire iron to the back of Embiid’s knee, perhaps, or maybe a Louisville slugger.
Maybe just skip the niceties and toss Embiid in the Schuylkill River, where he can sleep with the fishes.
The Knicks, by reason and by reputation, are too smart to get caught up in this. It is here that we go back to the same theme, the same mantra that has carried them along all season long: They don’t dwell. They don’t linger on bad breaks and bad news. They almost never allow one bad loss to affect the next game.
They don’t always win the next game — and if Embiid is going to make a habit of dropping half a hundred on them, they might not win this one — but it won’t be because they get caught up in the ancillary nonsense. In that sense they have a lot guys on the roster with the mentality of baseball closers: short memories, capable of flushing failures in a matter of seconds.
Those of us who have seen their work all year have seen this. Others might fall for the clever word salads of people like Philly’s Kelly Oubre Jr. — who before the series started took a shot at the Knicks and their celebrity fans and how the Garden was no big deal, then watched at the close of both Game 1 and Game 2 as the Knicks and their 19,812 helpers turned his and his teammates knees to jelly in the fourth quarters of both games.
This time, Oubre said, “I’m not gonna comment on what they’re commenting on, because at the end of the day, they’re going to hit, then we hit back, and then they cry and vice versa or whatever the case may be. Let’s just hoop let’s go out there and play hard. Nobody [is going to] fight. This ain’t the WWE. So at the end of the day, stand on the stuff that y’all say, and we’ll see tomorrow how they react.”
This is all very funny for two reasons:
1. It was the worst no-comment in the long and colorful history of no-comments.
2. It presumes the Knicks themselves have actually been crying. Which is actually pretty funny because it was the Sixers who started weeping around the time Nick Nurse didn’t call an immediate timeout after the Jalen Brunson 3 at the end of Game 2 — which would’ve spared the Sixers the vagaries of the ref’s whistles — and really didn’t stop until Embiid stepped to Robinson with a move straight out of the WWE.
The Knicks didn’t whine about that call afterward, by the way, not publicly. They didn’t file a grievance. That’s good. That means they have already cleared the decks in their minds and focused on the task at hand.
It’s already going to be too hard to face Embiid, and there’s too much at stake Sunday, to get caught up in the silliness. The challenge at hand is more than enough.
