Game 2 and the Pain of Being a Sixers Fan
Every year, the Sixers invent a new way to lose a playoff game.
“When Lowry went to the free throw line, I thought the game was over.”
That quote didn’t come from any Sixers player, coach, or staffer following Game 2’s heartbreaking 104-101 loss. Rather, it’s what I overheard from no fewer than two Knicks fans standing in front of me as I made my way down Madison Square Garden steps after the game. Interspersed between “F–k Embiid!” and “Let’s go Knicks!” chants, the hallway was littered with New York fans who couldn’t believe they were leaving the city with a 2-0 lead.
It was completely unbelievable to them, yet entirely too believable to every Philly fan who's watched this Sixers team for the past decade. Only they could get outscored 8-0 in the final 30 seconds of a game they led by five.
From Lowry missing yet another free throw to keep the lead at five, to the Knicks regaining possession after Lowry knocked the ball free at the 40-second mark, to Jalen Brunson’s three needing a 2019 Kawhi bounce to fall through, to Nick Nurse’s signal for a timeout being ignored, to the officials staying silent as Tyrese Maxey’s jersey was being ripped apart right in front of them — 10 different unlikely things needed to happen in succession for the Sixers to lose that game. So naturally, that’s precisely what transpired.
“I called timeout. The referee looked right at me, and ignored me,” Nick Nurse said after the game. “Tyrese Maxey got the ball. I called timeout again, he ignored me again. Then the melee started."
For the longest time, this was going to be a story on the star pairing of Tyrese Maxey and Joel Embiid. The two All-Stars combined for 69 points, 19 rebounds, and 16 assists in what was essentially a battle between them and a Knicks team that runs eight-deep with guys who can deliver for you. It was going to be a story about the Sixers digging deep and pulling out a gutsy win on the road over one of the toughest teams in the NBA. It was going to be about Embiid realizing that his body isn’t close to 100%, and deferring to Maxey down the stretch to carry the team home.
But somehow, some way, through a combination of questionable officiating, missed Sixers opportunities, and (of course) absolute generational missed fortune, the Sixers are down 2-0, and none of Maxey’s heroics or Embiid’s big plays matter.
It’s hard to reflect on any of the first 47 minutes of the game when that’s how it ended. It was a cruel trap. The first 99% of that action on Monday was simply designed to lure Sixers fans into a false sense of happiness – only for them to suffer a somehow entirely new form of basketball pain.
Doom scrolling the timeline after the loss, no one described that pain better than Sixers fan and friend of The Ricky @legsanity:
That’s the feeling, isn’t it?
Other fanbases can experience the joy and thrill of snatching victory out of the jaws of defeat, while Sixers fans have to enter each postseason expecting that their favorite team will find a new way to hurt them.
There are a few cases of the Sixers pulling off miracles — Games 1 and 4 against Boston last season, the Mike Scott game in 2019, and the Batum/Chicken-led comeback in the Play-In game vs the Heat just last week. But still, none of those have the same meaning as all of their cosmically evil playoff losses. The Sixers still lost the series vs the Celtics last year in heartbreaking fashion. The Mike Scott game came against a Nets team everyone knew stood no chance against the Sixers. The Play-In game, by definition, did not happen in the actual playoffs.
The only true moment where a Sixers miracle swung a series was Embiid’s game-winner against Toronto in Game 3 of the 2022 first-round series. It’s what made that moment so special. Rarely have Sixers fans felt that much unbridled joy from a playoff game.
(Even then, that joy was almost immediately ripped away by the Sixers dropping their next two games, and needing to play in a Game 6 where a Pascal Siakam elbow to Embiid’s face derailed another playoff run.)
The easier list to come up with is soul crushing Sixers playoff losses suffered over the past seven seasons. As brutal as last night’s defeat was, it still doesn’t reach the mountaintop of Philly basketball-induced pain. Heck, it might not even crack the top three.
That list doesn’t even include the Confetti Game vs the Celtics in 2018. Or the Game 4 at home against the Raptors in 2019, when the Sixers just barely missed their chance to go up 3-1 on the eventual champions. Losing Game 7 to Boston in 2023 isn’t even close to the list, given most true Sixers fans knew what the result would be after blowing Game 6. It’s just an unbelievably painful existence for everyone who subjects themselves to being a fan of this team.
Teams that repeatedly crash out in the playoffs are usually broken up by this point. The Jazz made their first run with Donovan Mitchell and Rudy Gobert in 2018 — the same year Embiid made his playoff debut — yet were broken up in 2023 following one too many playoff flameouts. The Lob City Clippers were the best team that franchise had ever had in 40 years of existence, yet were dispersed in 2017 once it became clear that the rest of the Western Conference was just too good for them to truly compete. Even that same Hawks team that eliminated the Sixers in 2021 is on the brink of its own detonation with the franchise having completely regressed in the years since.
The Sixers have cycled out two secondary stars over the past few years, both following playoff collapses where they felt largely to blame, failing to meet the moment while Embiid battled through injury. Those other teams cut bait because it became clear that their team fundamentally just did not have the talent needed to win at the highest level. Yet the Sixers persist with Embiid — and he continues to try and win here — because it’s so easy to see how just a few things have to break right for this team to be good enough. If they could just get one healthy Embiid playoff run, if they could just get one co-star next to him who didn’t have a meltdown in a big playoff series, then the dream of a parade on Broad Street might not seem so silly.
In that sense, Embiid and Maxey playing this well only makes the pain of Game 2’s loss sting even worse. Maxey has risen to the occasion, in spite of being so sick that he couldn’t move on Sunday night. Embiid — though clearly hobbled and far from 100% after returning from injury — still, more often than not, looks like the best player on the floor. The Sixers are +17 in his 76 minutes of play thus far, and he still boasts monstrous averages of 31.5 points, 9 rebounds, and 6 assists through the first two game (though his shooting percentages from the field, from three, and from the free throw line are all way down, which is obviously less than ideal).
Embiid is shooting poorly, but he’s been a flamethrower compared to Brunson. The Knicks’ MVP candidate has only made 16 of his 55 field goal attempts in the first two games, and has been pretty severely outplayed by the two other All-Stars in this series. But it doesn’t matter, because the next seven best players after those three might all be wearing New York Knick uniforms. Every time a Sixers player not named Embiid or Maxey scores, it feels like an otherworldly blessing, while every player on the Knicks feels like a serious threat to make an incredible play every time they catch the ball. Hart, DiVincenzo, McBride, Hartenstein, Robinson, Bogdanovic — they’ve all been massive positives for the Knicks through two games, while the only Sixer to give Maxey and Embiid any form of consistent help so far in this series is the 38-year-old Lowry.
The pain only grows worse the further you run down the list of outlier bad things that had to happen for the Sixers to be down 2-0:
Josh Hart played 81 games during the regular season, and did not make 4 threes in any one of those games. He’s already made 4 threes in both of the first two games of this series.
The Sixers entered Monday with a 6-2 record when Maxey scored at least 35 points this season, and a 17-2 record whenever Embiid scored at least 34 points. Last night was the first game all season where both of them hit at least 34 points — and it was still a loss.
Of all the things that swung against the Sixers in Game 2, it’s clear that the officiating is what irritated them the most. As first reported by Kyle Neubeck of PHLY Sports, the Sixers filed a complaint with the NBA over the officiating in the first two games of the series. From Neubeck’s story, here are the complaints the Sixers specifically want addressed:
“The Sixers were disadvantaged by two calls in the last two-minute report from Game 1 — an incorrect no-call on a foul from Mitchell Robinson on Tyrese Maxey, and an incorrect no-call on a traveling violation committed by Jalen Brunson .”
“Philadelphia believes Nick Nurse called for a timeout twice on the inbounds pass that swung the game in the final minute, once prior to the inbounds pass and once following the ball getting to Tyrese Maxey on the floor.”
“The Knicks have included private information about the referees in their game notes.”
“The Sixers have been the most disadvantaged team in the last two-minute report this season. A report compiled in early April showed that the Sixers had been disadvantaged on 22 calls in these reports during the regular season compared to 11 such errors going against opposing teams, the worst such ratio in the NBA.”
In full honesty, the timeout debacle is probably too close to call for there ever to be a definitive answer. If you root for the Sixers, it looks like Nurse clearly called for it in time. If you root for the Knicks, he clearly pump-faked on his timeout and was too hesitant for it to be granted in the heat of the moment. The great thing about fandom is that neither side will ever agree on this.
The most legitimate gripe is the no call on Brunson grabbing Maxey’s jersey. This isn’t a call an official should ever miss in a game this important.
Whether you think the series has been somehow rigged against the Sixers or that filing the grievance complaint is complete loser behavior, nothing is going to change. The NBA is not going to replay the end of that game. The Sixers are still down 2-0. DiVincenzo still hit that three. The Sixers still need to win four out of their next five games if they want to keep their season alive.
The hope *might* be that the complaint catches the attention of the NBA enough that more calls swing in the Sixers’ favor moving forward. But that’s only a guess, and one where it’s very hard to see it working out. Kelly Oubre didn’t suddenly get more calls after he besmirched the names of three officials and their entire family trees (as a matter of fact, the opposite happened).
Meanwhile, a series comeback is not an impossible task. These two teams are clearly very evenly matched, as evidenced by back-to-back games that went down to the wire. It’s just hard for Sixers fans to believe that this time will truly be different, that this is the series where Sisyphus finally gets that boulder all the way up the hill.
But that’s one of the reasons they're professional athletes and so many of us are not. Everyone in that Sixers locker room has to believe full heartedly that they’re good enough to win four out of five against a 50-win team, that they’re going to shake off the playoff demons from years past. They have made good adjustments in this series. Oubre, Batum, and Tobias Harris have played good defense on Brunson. Clearing the floor for Maxey to attack one-on-one is working. The defensive rebounding was a lot better in Game 2 for the first 47 minutes.
It’s why every Sixers fan is back in for year seven of the Embiid playoff experience. They know that time and time again, this team is so close, just a break or two away from making the deep playoff run everybody wants. As bad as it looks, the Sixers still have a chance with No. 21 on their side.
“We’re good. We’re going to win this series,” Embiid said at his locker after the game. “We are going to win this. We know what we got to fix. We did a better job today, so we are going to fix it.”
“We are the better team, and we’re going to keep fighting.”
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
“The Danny” is brought to you by the Official Realtor Of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
How beautiful is that home crowd going to be on Thursday? Maxey and Embiid should be carried on and off court on fans' lofted hands. Watch the knee though.