Despite a Game 1 loss, the Sixers showed they are the more talented team. Is that enough?

NEW YORK — Let’s pretend that the big fella is healthy. Just for practical purposes. There’s no sense wasting any words on the possibility that Joel Embiid’s knee will limit him moving forward. If it does, then the series is over. There are no contingencies. Game 1 made that clear.

It made something else clear, too. As long as Embiid is healthy, the Sixers are the better team in this series. They have the most talent. They have the most difficult player to defend. They had two of the three bona fide stars who were on the court on Saturday night.

There is no reason to panic after a 111-104 loss to a higher-seeded, better-rested team playing on its home court. Quite the opposite. Assuming, well, you know.

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You heard it in their words, in the inflection in their voices. Tyrese Maxey, Kyle Lowry, Nick Nurse. Each had the same thing to say. This was not one of those losses that causes a team to question everything about itself. There will be no burning of the game tape. The Sixers did what they set out to do, played how they set out to play, all with a commendable degree of precision.

They were outrebounded by a devastating 23-9 margin on the offensive glass. They made four fewer three-pointers on the same number of attempts as their opponent. That was the story.

“We had three wide-open threes when we’re up three to take it to six and didn’t make one and they made three in a row,” said Nurse, the Sixers’ coach. “It’s literally, like, there’s a whole lot of million other things going on out there and that kind of determines it.”

The rebounding is the type of thing that can be fixed. The shooting tends to even itself out over the course of a series. Some nights, you are going to watch a guy crush your momentum with an awkward, double-clutch three over a defender, as Josh Hart did with a minute left. Other nights, that guy will be you, or your teammate.

“He made some big-time shots,” Maxey said of the former Villanova star who knocked down four three-pointers and grabbed 13 rebounds in his current role as the Knicks’ grinder-in-chief. “You have to tip your cap.”

Despite Hart’s efforts, the Sixers outscored the Knicks when he was on the court. Same goes for each of the other four New York starters. When Embiid was on the court, the Sixers outscored them by 14.

That’s a heck of a qualifier, I know. The non-Embiid minutes count, too. Even if we assume that the injury scare in the second quarter was the last of the postseason, and that he will spend the rest of the series looking as dominant as he did before retreating to the locker room, the Sixers have to be better when he is on the bench. He played 36½ minutes in Game 1, 21 of them after he returned from that issue with his surgically repaired left knee. The Sixers can’t count on him for much more than that.

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It’s a concern. A big one. The problem wasn’t so much the lack of Embiid’s presence in the middle as it was the lack of any offensive punch from the five guys on the court. The Buddy Hield experience lasted a total of 10 minutes and 58 seconds, and featured one three-point attempt. He did not look like a player who is capable of impacting a postseason series. It will be interesting to see if Nurse tries to get Hield going by juggling his rotation or altering his game plan, or if he decides to look somewhere else entirely.

“We’ve got to be able to go out there and win those minutes without the big fella,” Maxey said.

Yet . . .

Let’s not forget the big picture that is an NBA playoff series. The Knicks’ dominance off the bench came primarily from one player. Miles “Deuce” McBride was unconscious for most of his 28 minutes on the court. He scored 21 points, shot 5-of-7 from three-point range. Few if any were gimmes. He won the Knicks this game. That’s really all there is to it.

That, and the defensive rebounding. Nurse has a challenge there. The Knicks are who they are, the best offensive-rebounding team in the league. The Sixers knew it coming in.

“We know what they are going to do,” Lowry said. “They get to their spots. They execute that game plan extremely well. But it’s one game. We have a game on Monday. Get our rest, look at the film, see where we can get better angles and everything.”

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When they watch the film, the dramatic tension of this series will be on full display. The Sixers have the manpower to win this thing. In the first quarter, when they built up a 13-point lead, it looked like they might win it going away. But on the other side of the equation is an equally formidable force. The Knicks play a brand of basketball that plays well in the postseason, and they do it as perfectly as any team you’ll see.

They are good. Very good. They will be very difficult to beat. But Game 1 showed us that the Sixers are more than capable of doing it. There were plenty of extended flashes where they looked like a team that nobody in the playoffs should want to play.

Clean some things up. Wait for the shots to fall. After that, it all comes down to Embiid.