The Sixers’ 3-0 deficit to Knicks is months in the making

In the moments after Philadelphia’s euphoric Game 7 win over the Boston Celtics, Nick Nurse’s message to his team was direct. Celebrate this one until midnight, the coach told his players, and then we move on to the next job and the next round. The Knicks would require their total focus and best effort, or the comeback push from round one was all for nothing.

On Friday, the Sixers absorbed the most crushing loss of the series to date, a defeat that pushed the series to 3-0 Knicks and left Xfinity Mobile Arena echoing with the roars of New York fans. Players were forced to listen to an arena taken over by the visitors as they wallowed in defeat during the closing minutes, with Paul George offering a brief reply when asked what the message would be in the locker room ahead of Game 4.

“Shit, just win a game,” George said on Friday night. “Keep it alive.”

In a way, that has been the theme of Philadelphia’s season. Keep it alive during one of the many extended absences for Joel Embiid, keep it alive during Paul George’s 25-game suspension, keep it alive when Tyrese Maxey hit the shelf for a hand injury, keep it alive as the Celtics beat you by 30+ points on your home floor to put your year on the brink. The Sixers have ping ponged between the opposite sides of the it’s over/we’re back spectrum all year, never giving fans much time to savor success or drown in their sorrows.

But it does feel, with the series still technically alive, that they have run out of shovels and ladders at the bottom of a deep hole.

Their franchise center is hobbled to a near-unplayable state, with Joel Embiid brave enough to play and bold enough to think he can play well but beaten down enough that even his postgame hygiene routines are slower. He looks noticeably less explosive than he was just a week ago, the collisions from the end of Game 7 weighing heavily on his play. Before Friday’s Game 3 began, Embiid and Tyrese Maxey shared a moment by his locker, his younger counterpart in awe that he would take the floor at all. And his coach said without saying that the physical limitations are more significant than the public can probably appreciate.

“I thought he gave us everything he could,” Nick Nurse said. “I really do. I think he tried to give us everything he could tonight, and that’s all he can do.”

The Sixers, unfortunately, are not in a competition to show who can play through the most pain. Embiid’s current limitations as a switch defender, rim protector, and rebounder showed up constantly in Game 3, the Knicks poking and prodding him whenever and wherever they could.

Their All-Star guard is still nursing that hand injury, gunshy from three, and getting blitzed by the Knicks to make anyone else beat them. Tyrese Maxey is talking as though being schemed out of the series, relegated to just 12 shot attempts in Game 3, is a simple inevitability.

“I shot the ball well,” Maxey said when asked about whether his finger continues to bother him. “I shot 8 for 12, and I had seven assists. Passed the ball when I was supposed to, shot the ball when I was supposed to.”

That hand injury, for what it’s worth, was suffered when the Sixers were down seven points to another play-in contender with 23 seconds left in an early March game, Maxey colliding with Adem Bona in an ill-fated attempt to extend an eventual loss. It is a direct product of Philadelphia’s desperate chase to steal wins from unlikely places to make up for the fact that their two older stars were missing for much of the regular season gauntlet.

And their two-way wing has been electric in spurts but rarely in second halves, frontloading his offense and fading from view as games wear on. Unlike the other two, Paul George has remarked that he feels healthier than ever, perhaps worn down by games piling up but otherwise in good standing. But he may have the simplest excuse of them all — he’s 36 years old, no longer capable of sustaining high-level performances against high-level competition for four quarters. Not while having to defend Karl-Anthony Towns on the block, at the rim, and out to the three-point line to protect Embiid’s legs from more wear and tear.

Philadelphia’s selection of this group appeared savvy in the aftermath of the win over Boston, and you could even squint and justify the path the Sixers had chosen to walk down the last two years. The lack of appearances in back-to-back games, the lack of expectation that Embiid or George would push through pain, perhaps it really had been worth it if it meant you could put this group on the floor together in relatively good health for a series.

But if that was true, one must ask, how does one justify Philadelphia’s future-focused deadline? How does one square trading one of their only competent shooters at the deadline to the defending champions while failing to secure an incoming player via trade? If the plan is to protect your stars to compete in the postseason, doesn’t that require holding onto as many options as possible on your bench?

Whether the Jared McCain trade is a net positive for the Sixers in the long-term or not, whether he specifically would have helped in this series or not, it was an unequivocal and undisputable net negative in the short-term. There is no way around it being a pure subtraction from the roster with a core group that isn’t going to get healthier or younger in the remaining years of their contracts. A shooting-starved playoff team put themselves in a position where if Quentin Grimes isn’t hitting shots off the bench, no one was going to hit shots off the bench.

The Knicks, mind you, have beaten the Sixers up with depth, getting 15 big points from former Philly reserve Landry Shamet on the road in Game 3. In comparison, Philadelphia had a whopping 0 bench points through three quarters on Friday night.

“It was the others,” Embiid said after the loss. “Obviously, Jalen [Brunson] is going to do his thing; he’s going to score. So you can’t get frustrated when that happens. I thought tonight, we doubled at the wrong times, they made us pay every single time.”

“You guys only see the finished product,” Jalen Brunson told reporters on Friday. “You guys see what’s on the court. You guys see when the cameras are on, when there’s media access. You guys don’t see the ups and downs of us in the locker room talking things out. You guys don’t see us in practice trying to figure things out….we have times where we look disconnected, and we look connected. That’s basketball. That’s sports. That’s life. There’s going to be ups and downs. It’s all about how you move on and how you move in a positive direction, regardless of when things are negative or positive.”

Already, there is a growing chorus of people who are dejected enough with this performance against New York to regret the Sixers’ win over Boston. In a way, this sort of loss is more valuable than a false dream inspired by a valiant comeback effort that fell short in Game 7. Forced to run the gauntlet instead of imagining what might have been, the Sixers have gotten pummeled, showing the limitations of their core and the drawbacks of their approach. Should the series end without a counterpunch from the group, it will be a summer of questioning everyone and everything, a lot of wondering how the Sixers could just run this team back if the best they can do is an ass-whooping handed down by the Knicks in round two. Could anyone actually buy into another pray for health luck season?

That they are still here at all is a testament to their depth of character. Unfortunately, they are short on depth of basketball players and shared experience, the product of deliberate choices to build around this core group. In their efforts to split the difference between the present and the future, the Sixers may have only arrived at a crossroads faster.