Instant observations: Sixers submit another season-ending embarrassment in Game 4 loss to Knicks

The Sixers added another embarrassing chapter to their book of playoff failures, sitting down and quitting in a 144-114 loss that featured garbage time for the entire fourth quarter. Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, and Paul George all got a courtside seat as Knicks backups got a cardio run in on their way to another Conference Finals appearance.

Here’s what I saw.

Top-to-bottom embarrassment

The Sixers have spent a lot of this season telling anyone who would listen how close this team was, how resilient the locker room is, and that they wanted to spend this season setting a nightly standard that Philadelphia can be proud of. Maxey’s media day speech on the matter has been used in TV ads for the team all year long, highlighting what was supposed to be their rallying cry. They ended their season with their home arena being taken over by the visiting team’s fans as the team got absolutely blitzed on the defensive end. Not sure what “the standard” is worth if it doesn’t show up with your season on the line in the second round.

Joel Embiid was the easy target in this series, literally and figuratively, with the Knicks testing his mobility at every possible opportunity. I would certainly argue that his limitations were the most impactful in this series, because they made it nearly impossible for the Sixers to put together a game plan that would consistently bother New York. Sitting in drop allowed Jalen Brunson to walk into easy pull-up looks, playing high almost guaranteed that he wouldn’t get back to the paint, and he had no rhythm trying to play roamer off of Josh Hart, losing runners on rebounds while trying to avoid thinking too much about his ailing body.

I think he probably has the least to hang his head about on the effort front, because the want to was still there despite his body having very little to offer. He was a set-up man for a lot of the first half, shooting a perfect 6/6 from the field while spending a lot of his time popping out to the three-point line and setting screens, content to let other guys launch away as pressure swarmed middle. But the lack of explosiveness is what it is, and he had a rough moment where his leg nearly gave out on a completely uncontested drive to the rim in the first half. All the scoring in the world isn’t enough for this team — Embiid had 24 points on 8/8 from the field early in the third quarter, and the Sixers were down by 29 points.

The issue is that the Sixers need to find a way to win not just without him but with a compromised version of him on the floor, and that’s getting harder and harder in an NBA getting deeper, faster, and more athletic on a player-by-player and team-by-team basis. New York absolutely hammered him in space in the three games he suited up for. It feels insane to continue hoping that reality will suddenly shift in their favor after watching the same story play out in the playoffs every year, and the toughest part is that they don’t really have a choice but to hope for a miraculous, once-in-a-career run. The whole league sees the problems they deal with every year and isn’t going to bail them out of them without the Sixers incentivizing them to do so. Admiring his desire to keep going doesn’t make the reality any less bleak.

Comparatively, I’m a lot more bothered by the complete lack of give a shit in this game from someone like Tyrese Maxey, whose ailing hand has nothing to do with whether he is paying attention on a given defensive possession or not. While the Sixers didn’t do enough to challenge Jalen Brunson throughout this series, New York made sure to capitalize on Maxey’s poor gambling habits and disconnected approach on defense, running past him for offensive rebounds or cutting behind him for open layups.

Maxey logged an immense amount of minutes this season, dragging this team toward respectability when he had very little help around him. He certainly deserves a lot of credit for that and the work it took to put him here. But we are long past the point where he can be treated like a victim of happenstance when the Sixers completely crumble on one end of the floor or another. Philadelphia worked to get him off-ball reps, ran the offense through him on-ball, and got him the most shot attempts on the team in Sunday’s first half. He gave away multiple turnovers, shot 40 percent from the field, and missed every three-pointer he got, carrying all those failures over to the other end with his shoulders slumped and his eyes looking around for someone else to blame. Not good enough, and a disappointing end to what was ultimately a great individual season.

Maxey wasn’t the only one dreaming of trips to the Maldives in the middle of the game. The Sixers as a whole were simply dreadful on the defensive end, botching KYP and gameflow situations in a manner that should be impossible four games into a series. Miles McBride hit three consecutive threes against the Sixers to push New York’s lead to 17-6 early in the game, forcing a Philadelphia timeout, and on the next defensive possession out of the timeout, the Sixers left McBride wide open on the wing and watched him can another one. They went under screens and strayed from Karl Anthony-Towns, who hit two threes in the first half and also used that space to set up drive-and-drop opportunities as a passer. Overhelping one pass away was back on the menu after they largely corrected that problem against Boston, which amplified their issues on the glass. Kelly Oubre might as well have played this game in horse blinders. Paul George took seven total shot attempts.

I think the fear around Philadelphia should be the idea that dramatic changes simply aren’t on the menu, even though this performance would warrant an across-the-board wipeout. The Sixers went all-in on a stars-or-bust approach two summers ago, but someone forgot or failed to convince the owner that a team might need more than six or seven playable guys to get out of the second round once they actually made the playoffs. Their options this summer are limited unless they’re willing to fire big names or make team-altering trades that sacrifice most of their draft capital. Their approach to this season and the trade deadline suggests the organization might just be content to avoid throwing good money after bad. The trouble with that is that it will push deeper into Maxey’s career before they can make any moves of consequence, and create even more cultural rot around the fanbase that I’m not sure they can overcome.

If Josh Harris has the capacity to feel shame, he should think long and hard about where this franchise has gone since the team first broke through coming out of their rebuild in 2017-18. At the time, the city was fired up about the long road ahead, about watching their young guys grow, and with picks and cap space to boost their chances along the way. Apathy is so abundant now that Knicks fans taking over their home arena in the playoffs was treated as inevitable before the series even started. The only thing close to a guiding belief for the Sixers since Sam Hinkie resigned in spring 2016 has been chasing the biggest name possible to fill whatever opening they have on the roster, coach’s bench, or front office seat. That’s brought them to this clusterfuck of a series and is bigger than Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey, certainly.

At least the Sixers had a stretch for a while where they were fun and good in the regular season before running out of outs in the playoffs. Now they’re just soul-draining to follow all year round. But you have to give Harris this — at least the team used up a bunch of goodwill to try to fight for their own arena adjacent to a culturally significant Philadelphia neighborhood before Xfinity and the Flyers came back and gave them a better revenue split for the next building. That’s what gets the fans fired up, baby!

If this is the team and situation Harris is happy with, he won’t be able to act surprised as fans continue to retreat from the franchise and spend their time on teams and hobbies that don’t disrespect their time and intelligence as this one has. What happens next is squarely on him, and we’ll see if he’s prepared to do something about it other than selling more tickets to New Yorkers through Ticketmaster.

(With all that being said, I had fun covering yet another season for you all, and riding the roller coaster along with everyone still crazy enough to put belief in this team. I don’t take the opportunity for granted, even if the people running the team do!)

Good season, rook

For as good as VJ Edgecombe was for a rookie and as impactful as his all-around play has been all year, this series was a snapshot of the battle ahead of him. The Knicks were quite content to let him bomb away on wide-open threes as this series wore on, and he was unable to punish them for doing so, with his early missed threes looming large in the first half of Sunday’s game. Edgecombe continued to turn good looks into Knicks run outs, and any mid-series success he had against Jalen Brunson evaporated into the South Philly sky.

In the regular season, Edgecombe only just managed to scrape his way to around average from three, bouncing between some big-time heaters and “can’t hit water from a boat” performances. Although he wasn’t drafted on the expectation that he would be an elite shooter right away, turning into a can’t dare guy from deep is going to be critical to his success playing alongside Tyrese Maxey. He has all the athleticism in the world but isn’t refined enough as a slasher to either get all the way to the rim or consistently draw free throws, so drawing defenses out of the paint has to be his first goal.

I am wildly happy with what we saw from Edgecombe and how hard he continued to fight in this series, and I look forward to seeing what year two looks like. But this is also what happens when a rookie needs to be one of your most important players.

Other notes

— Knowing what ticket prices cost for playoff games and feeling the angst this fanbase had after the Sixers went down 3-0, I am certainly not going to shame anyone in Philadelphia for opting out of spending their Mother’s Day at Xfinity Mobile Arena. Watching the Sixers lay down on defense to open this game, you were all justified to focus on your mothers and families, or whatever else you might have spent this day doing.

My gripe is with the Sixers for how they handle arena takeovers like the one we saw on Sunday afternoon. Game operations just turn the volume up on the speakers to what has to be the highest level possible, in an ill-fated attempt to yell over the huge group of visiting fans taking over their arena. The only thing they succeed at doing is making anyone in the building slightly more deaf than they were upon arrival.

Own the embarrassment of not being able to stop an opposing fanbase from taking over your arena, honestly. The shenanigans should be beneath them, but maybe that’s just me wishing for a different organization than the one I am covering.