Craig Kimbrel’s implosion was easy to foresee, hard to avoid. Now, it might be impossible to overcome.

PHOENIX – The Phillies’ problems are bigger than Craig Kimbrel. But he is most definitely their biggest.

You know it. I know it. Rob Thomson knows it. Kimbrel himself must know it.

The real question is whether that knowledge matters.

There is no time for fixes. What’s next for Kimbrel may not matter. Those were things the Phillies needed to consider long before Friday night: before they entrusted the veteran right-hander with a two-run lead in the eighth inning, before he allowed four of the six runners he faced to reach base, before the Diamondbacks tied the game on a two-run home run by Alek Thomas, before they won it 6-5 to even the National League Championship series at two games apiece.

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The Phillies entered the postseason committed to Kimbrel as one of their two highest-leverage bullpen arms. They did so despite seeing the deterioration in his underlying fundamentals over the last couple months of the regular season. They remained so despite a number of treacherous moments in his first five playoff outings, including the walk-off run he allowed on Thursday in Game 3.

Nothing about what they saw from Kimbrel and Game 4 should have surprised them. It wasn’t willful ignorance that led Thomson to call on him with the Phillies leading 5-3 and six outs away from going up 3-1 in the series. It was a lack of options.

Those options remain the same. The only thing that has changed is the Phillies’ situation. They were two wins away from the World Series. Now, they are two losses away from the end of their season.

“The last two games sucked,” Kimbrel said after his second straight loss evened an NLCS that the Phillies once led 2-0. “I rolled up in here and cost us two games. But the bright side is, we’re still tied at 2-2. We’ve got a game here tomorrow and then we get to go home.”

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There were lots of tough questions to ask of Thomson and Kimbrel in the wake of the disaster. Almost all of them were moot. The only way to solve their late-innings woes is to make the late innings not matter.

The Phillies will enter a pivotal Game 5 needing a lot of innings from Zack Wheeler and a lot of runs from the lineup. Thomson can’t trust Kimbrel or Orion Kerkering even if they are somehow able to pitch for a third consecutive day. Kerkering allowed five of the six batters he faced to reach base in Games 3 and 4, including back-to-back walks that forced a crucial run home in the seventh inning on Friday.

Jose Alvarado and Jeff Hoffman have pitched on back-to-back days. Matt Strahm could be an option for a tight spot in Game 5, although he threw 19 pitches in Game 4. Same goes for Seranthony Domínguez, who threw 23. Gregory Soto should be available, but is that really a good thing? In Friday’s loss, he was charged with the run that Kerkering walked home, having allowed two of the three batters he faced to reach base. Their best hope might be Ranger Suárez, the rubber-armed wonder who picked up the save in Game 5 of last year’s NLCS two days after he started Game 3.

“We’ll check in with them tomorrow and see how many guys we’ve got available,” said Thomson, who acknowledged that Suárez could be an option. “We’re certainly not going to put people in jeopardy, but this is a tough group, and they want to play.”

As for Kimbrel? That ship has already sailed. In an ideal scenario, the Phillies win Game 5 to take a 3-2 series lead and then clinch in a laugher that offers a low-pressure spot for Kimbrel to try to get himself right for the World Series. Thomson can’t possibly run him back out there with a game on the line.

“We have to talk about it,” the manager said, “but do you put him in at a little lower leverage spot? I don’t know. I’ll talk with (pitching coach) Caleb (Cotham) and talk through it and see where we’re at.”

Truth is, Kimbrel has always been the biggest reason to doubt the Phillies could survive another long postseason run. Anybody who was paying attention could see that an implosion like this was brewing. It had been throughout this postseason. The results may have been there. But, man, did the underlying fundamentals look shaky.

In his five postseason appearances before Friday, Kimbrel threw just 56% of his pitches for strikes. He walked twice as many batters (4) as he struck out (2). He was averaging a wildly unhealthy 4.7 pitches thrown per plate appearance. All of those numbers are a dramatic departure from what we saw from mid-April to early July, when Kimbrel went 12-for-12 in save opportunities to earn an All-Star Game berth. He walked just eight batters during that stretch while striking out 54, throwing 67% of his pitches for strikes and averaging 4.3 pitches per plate appearance.

Nobody should have been surprised by what they saw in Games 3 and 4. Friday’s meltdown started with a ball, and then a foul, and then another ball, and then a 94-mph fastball up in the zone that Lourdes Gurriel Jr. drilled for a leadoff double. After falling behind Evan Longoria and getting him to line out, Kimbrel fell behind pinch-hitter Alex Thomas 3-1. A foul ball made the count 3-2.

All you could do was cross your fingers and hope that Kimbrel could somehow manage to summon the same angels that had helped him wriggle out of previous jams.

They never showed.

Kimbrel threw Thomas a belt-high fastball and the Diamondbacks pinch-hitter did not miss, hitting a two-run home run that tied the game at 5-5 with one out in the eighth. Kimbrel allowed two more batters to reach base — the last of whom he hit with a pitch — before Thomson finally pulled the plug. Alvarado came on to allow the go-ahead hit, a single by Gabriel Moreno, and that was that.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Kimbrel said. “I’ve lost a lot of ballgames and I’ve won a lot of ballgames. The only way you come back and be successful is believe that you can. I believe that when I touch the ball it’s gonna be great.”

It’s an admirable sentiment from a guy who has seen his share of adversity in 14 years in the majors. But willpower has its limits. The stuff isn’t there, nor is the location. In Game 4, Kimbrel reached 95 mph on only four of his 13 fastballs. Per Statcast, he averaged 94.6 mph, down from his season-long average of 95.8 mph.

Kimbrel said he isn’t “far at all” from finding himself.

“When I’m just missing, it’s slightly anything usually,” he said. “I’ll figure it out. I’ll get ready, grab the ball again and go out and do my job. The last two days sucked, but I can’t let that get in the way of what my job is and what I need to do.”

Really, though, what else can he say? The Phillies are well past the point of relying on happy thoughts. They have a problem that won’t just magically go away if they win two of the next three.

Thomson has a lot of hard questions to ask himself. There may not be any good answers.