Take 2

The Knicks try again to close out Philly.

Good morning. Hope yesterday was better for all of you than it was for me.

Game Night

TONIGHT: Knicks at Sixers, 9:00 pm, TNT

Injury Report: Mitch and Embiid are both listed as questionable.

Halftime: Time for redemption. Here’s the link.

What to watch for: A better first quarter. I wrote on Monday how the Knicks had just a 95.7 offensive rating in the first quarters of this series. Well on Monday, it was 103.9 - a bit better, but not by much.

Philly’s crowd is going to be wild at the outset. If the Knicks can be the aggressors out of the gate, it would go a long way towards making this less of an uphill climb than every other game in this series has been.

News & Notes

🏀 Guess who’s back…

Julius Randle is back with CAA. According to Stefan Bondy, he’ll be going back to Aaron Mintz, and the move “was in the works for a while.”

🏀 Bogey had successful surgery. He’ll be re-evaluated in three months.

🏀 The Last 2 Minute Report for Game 5 found that Tyrese Maxey traveled on his 4-point play. Hooray.

🏀 The Sixers ownership group and Michael Rubin announced that they will purchase 2,000 Game 6 tickets and attempt to distribute them exclusively to Sixers fans for free.

🏀 Lastly, a correction (and thanks to Steven Freeman for pointing this out): there is a third team that came back from 3-1 down without home court advantage: the 1968 Boston Celtics, over the Sixers in the East Finals. Like the ‘95 Rockets and ‘16 Cavs, they went on to win it all.

History On Our Side?

I sat down to write today’s newsletter early yesterday morning and I still wasn’t prepared to write about the actual game or give serious thought to adjustments for Game 6. Sorry, but…yeah.

If you’re looking for actual analysis, please take a few minutes to check out Benjy’s thread from yesterday. In it, he highlights several keys / missteps from Game 5 that can and should be fixed before tonight, and which I’ve summarized here:

1. Stop doubling Joel Embiid with Maxey one pass away. This led to a way too many easy looks for Tyrese, and arguably got him in a groove that would eventually result in a career night. Embiid is hobbled. Single cover, or show help but don’t hard double. At the very least, be ready with a corresponding rotation (as they did at times, with much success) to help the helper.

2. Keep hunting Tobias Harris, and keep attacking Joel Embiid to his right, further exploiting his lack of mobility on the defensive end.

3. Whoever is guarding Maxey needs to force him left. This was a repeated cardinal sin by Josh Hart in Game 5, who continually opened his hips to allow Tyrese to drive right. On the bright side, Donte DiVincenzo was quite a bit better.

4. Run some offense late, and don’t play hero ball. This one is toughest for me to swallow because the fault lies at the feet of my two favorite people associated with this team. Jalen needs to trust his teammates, and Thibs needs to remind him to trust his teammates.

5. This wasn’t on Benjy’s thread but I think it needs to be said: they have to be stronger with the ball and to the ball. New York had 14 turnovers, only 6 offensive rebounds, and allowed a dozen offensive boards. There was only one other game all season where they fared so poorly in all three of those categories: the 117-108 loss to Orlando that wound up being the final game for Immanuel Quickley and RJ Barrett as Knicks. Take care of all of those things, fix the above stuff, and they should be OK.

That’s all I got for thoughts on what did / will / can happen. I’m still so bummed that the amazing fourth quarter - or the first 11 minutes and 32 seconds of it at least - will be lost to time, probably regardless of what happens from here. Hopefully they make some new positive memories starting tonight.

So what are doing with the rest of today’s newsletter? Indulging in my version of comfort food, of course. To get a pep in my step, I dug into my favorite topic - NBA history - to try and find comfort in Tuesday night’s events.

Inspired by a comment from the postgame livestream about how the Sixers bounced back from their own devastating loss earlier in this very series, I decided to look at the results from 10 of the most heartbreaking playoff losses ever and see how the teams that came up short fared in both the next game and the series. This obviously isn’t a comprehensive list, but I tried to compile a representative sample size of crushing defeats in various respects, starting with…