Joel Embiid and the Sixers get the home crowd they deserve in 108-94 Game 3 loss to Knicks
After scoring the game’s first nine points and building a first-quarter lead that climbed to as high as 12, the home team turned into the exact squad that that so many home fans were willing to avoid.
Question: What do you get when you combine Derek Zoolander, Willy Wonka, and hundreds of guys who sound like My Cousin Vinny?
Answer: A home crowd in name only, and one the Sixers will continue to deserve for however long they keep serving up performances like their 108-94 loss to the Knicks in Game 3.
It takes a special kind of team to win Game 7 after being down three games to one in a series and then exhausting its goodwill before the end of its next home game. Somehow, the task seems perfectly suited for the Sixers. Less than a week after Joel Embiid begged fans to do their part to prevent the takeover of Xfinity Mobile Arena that occurred a couple of postseasons ago in a first-round series against the Knicks, Embiid and his teammates went out and showed exactly why so many of those fans opted not to heed his call. They were outworked, outhustled, outexecuted, and outplayed. For the fifth time in their last six playoff games in South Philly, the home court advantage went to those who opted not to attend.
» READ MORE: The Sixers go cold, Landry Shamet heats up and the Knicks win 108-94 to take a 3-0 series lead
The Knicks themselves deserve plenty of credit for the crowd, which included actors Ben Stiller and Timothée Chalamet. Their team is worth the trip. What you saw out of them in Game 3 is exactly what they have conditioned their fans to expect. With star forward OG Anunoby sidelined and the Sixers favored by 3½ points, they played like a team that was going to need to be beaten into submission.
It wasn’t just Jalen Brunson, who scored 33 points and continued to establish himself as one of the most diabolical shotmakers in recent NBA history. Mikal Bridges scored 23 tough points and continued his defensive harassment of Tyrese Maxey at the point of attack. Landry Shamet scored 15 points while coming off the bench to become the answer that Knicks coach Mike Brown needed to find for how best to replace Anunoby. That Bridges and Shamet once were Sixers — Bridges, infamously, only briefly — added to the dark poetry of the evening.
“It was a lot of Knicks fans, but they travel, I guess,” Sixers forward Paul George said. “I thought our fans were there in support as well. But it was a good showing by the Knicks crowd.”
For the Sixers, it was an opportunity squandered. Their comeback against the Celtics reawakened plenty of hearts and minds that had written off the Sixers after a lackluster regular season. Against the Knicks, they rebounded from a blowout in Game 1 with a spirited performance that easily could have left the series even in Game 2. With Anunoby’s hamstring potentially sidelining him beyond Game 3, the Sixers had a believable chance at climbing out of their two-games-to-none hole. But after scoring the game’s first nine points and building a first-quarter lead that climbed as high as 12, the home team turned into the exact squad that so many home fans were willing to avoid.
George scored 15 points in the first quarter and zero in the final three. The Sixers raced out to a 20-8 lead and then were outscored, 52-29, until Kelly Oubre Jr.’s three-pointer at the buzzer cut their halftime deficit to eight. After cutting the Knicks’ lead to four points in the third quarter, Embiid turned the ball over on two straight possessions. By the time Shamet hit a three-pointer with 7.1 seconds left in the third quarter, Xfinity Mobile Arena was echoing with chants of “Let’s go Knicks!”
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“I don’t know. I was focused on the game,” Embiid said of the crowd. “I really didn’t pay attention.”
You can’t blame Embiid for his attempt to pump up the home crowd with his comments after Game 7 in Boston. You can’t blame him for willing himself onto the court on Friday after missing Game 2 with hip and ankle injuries. You can’t even blame him for ducking the postgame question about the crowd. But even if he wasn’t paying attention, his bosses would be wise to. Their battle for hearts and minds will be right back where it was before the playoffs if the Sixers get swept at home on Sunday. That’s probably true, even if they salvage a game or two.
» READ MORE: Knicks fans had ‘boots on the ground’ at ‘MSG South’ for a Game 3 takeover in South Philly
There is a direct connection between performances like the one the Sixers delivered in Game 3 and the supply-demand ratio on the secondary ticket market. It was their seventh loss in their last 11 home conference semifinal games, a stretch that dates back to that 2021 series against the Atlanta Hawks in which they lost Games 1, 5, and 7 in South Philly. More often than not, a team gets the crowd it deserves. The Sixers’ problem isn’t that fans are selling playoff tickets rather than attending the games. The problem is why they are choosing to do so.
