PHILADELPHIA — There would be one last prayer, one last desperate heave, and the way things had gone this night — the way they’d gone the last two games — when Buddy Hield shotputted the basketball at the final buzzer you half-expected it drop, maybe with a little help from the backboard. Why not?
This time, there was no miracle. This time there was no heartbreak. The ball bounded harmlessly away, and the throaty Knicks contingent inside Wells Fargo Center — beginning with the Knicks themselves — let out a primal, guttural roar. It was over. It was done. Knicks 118, 76ers 115.
New York four games, Philly two.
“It was a great team effort,” Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau said. “I just can’t say enough about it.”
Later, with a smile he added: “Everyone has to pitch in and do a little bit more.”
That’s the thing about this team. The Knicks have forced New York to fall hard for them precisely because they are a team, loaded with unselfish workers and grinders who love to do a little bit more. If it’s a violation of a sacred civic compact to compare any team to the sainted Hit-The-Open-Man crew until it wins a championship the way that team did, it’s fair to say they are certainly spiritual descendants.
And every ounce of that was on display Thursday, a game the Knicks led 33-11 and trailed 71-61, in a series in which the final points tally was, almost impossibly, Knicks 650, 76ers 649. Every ounce was necessary.
“I liked the way we kept fighting,” Jalen Brunson said. “It doesn’t matter what the situation is; we’re going to fight.”
It all begins and ends with Brunson, and he was as incandescent as he’s ever been as a Knick on Thursday night: 41 points and 12 assists and one important shot after another. Yet he provided the signature moment of this team, and its make-up, by giving the ball up, late, with the score tied and Wells Fargo pleading for a Game 7, begging for two more days of basketball season.
Brunson passed to Josh Hart, and Hart’s first reaction — of course — was to pass off to Donte DiVincenzo. But the 76ers sloughed off him. One last time in a series in which they have dared him to shoot, begged him to shoot, they invited him to shoot.
And when it splashed clean, the Knicks had a three-point lead, there were 25.1 seconds left. This time, they were going to protect that lead like the Secret Service guarding POTUS. This time, Hart — whose missed free throw two nights earlier had opened up one final window for the Sixers at the end — will have a good night’s sleep.
“I had a day and a half to think about that, after I helped lose that game,” Hart said. “I was glad I was able to help win this one.”
Hart was Brunson’s chief wingman (16 points, 14 rebounds), and he did most of his second-half damage favoring one leg, when he dinged an ankle just before the half.
(“Josh is never close to coming out,” Thibodeau said, and he actually laughed as he said that. “It was a passing thought. I let it pass.”)
But this, truly, was an ensemble, an all-hands-on-deck special. Isaiah Hartenstein made almost all of those baby flip shots of his, which was good, because the Knicks needed every one, and he and Mitch Robinson did yeoman work holding Joel Embiid to 39 points.
OG Anunoby? He threw down a thunderous dunk over Embiid to give the Knicks an eight-point cushion late in the fourth, and that was a nice payback for Knicks fans who remember a difficult night 11 years ago when at the end of an elimination game in Indianapolis Carmelo Anthony went up for a poster dunk against Roy Hibbert and Hibbert met him at the apex and denied him.
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Deuce McBride only scored three points, but they might’ve been the most important points of the game, a 26-footer with 7:10 to go that erased the Sixers’ final lead. And while DiVincenzo broke out of a series-long shooting funk with five 3s, what was most impressive — and important — was the way he guarded Tyrese Maxey two days after it seemed the Knicks had no one who could slow him. DiVincenzo did.
“Everybody made sure,” Thibodeau said, “that everyone was on the same page.”
A week ago, this city had openly talked about disowning Villanova, and there was even some silly banter about temporarily removing the three Nova championship banners that adorn the rafters here; Thursday, the Brunson/Hart/DiVincenzo trio either scored or assisted on 110 of the Knicks’ 118 points.
It was enough — barely — to keep this splendid basketball season going in New York City for at least another couple of weeks. The Pacers come in young, on a roll, and feeling pretty good about themselves after taking down the Bucks. But the Knicks feel pretty good about themselves, too. See you at the big gym on top of Penn Station Monday night.
