The New York Knicks are moving on in the 2024 NBA playoffs, ousting the Philadelphia 76ers with a 118-115 win in Game 6 on Thursday night. It was a fitting end to a crazy back-and-forth series. The Knicks were led by Jalen Brunson's 41 points, and the New York guard made multiple clutch shots in the fourth quarter to help secure the series-clinching win. Josh Hart's 3-pointer with 24 seconds left gave the Knicks a 3-point lead that they did not relinquish.
Joel Embiid had another monster stat line for the 76ers, scoring 39 points with 13 rebounds. Buddy Hield and Nico Batum combined for 36 points off the Sixers' bench and hit nine 3-pointers. Tyrese Maxey, after his heroics in Game 5, had a quieter night with 17 points.
The Knicks jumped out to a 22-point lead in the first quarter, but the Sixers erased the deficit before halftime as Hield caught fire off the bench. The Knicks then led 109-101 with three minutes left, but the Sixers rallied again and Maxey tied the game at 111-11 before Josh Hart's clutch triple.
The Knicks advance in the 2024 NBA playoff bracket to face the sixth-seeded Indiana Pacers in the second round. Here are the biggest takeaways from tonight's game:
The Knicks picked their poison because they knew the antidote
Joel Embiid shot 7-of-19 from the floor in both Game 4 and 5, committing 13 total turnovers in the process. That was no accident. The Knicks were very intentional about throwing a variety of double-teams at him. OG Anunoby fronted him in the post relentlessly down the stretch of Game 4. The doubles came everywhere in Game 5. This was a conscious decision. The Knicks chose not to let Embiid beat them. Well, in Game 5, that meant that Tyrese Maxey would. Josh Hart and Deuce McBride largely defended him straight up, chasing him through screens without much help. The result was a 46-point explosion and a Game 5 win for Philadelphia.
So the Knicks flipped the script in Game 6. Instead of making Hart Maxey's primary defender, they put Donte DiVincenzo on him. DiVincenzo is a worse defender, but his job was easier. The Knicks threw extra help Maxey's way instead of Embiid's. The idea, this time, was to make Embiid beat them instead of Maxey. He did just that for most of the game. You don't score 39 points by accident. But there was a secondary motive here. Maxey is young, a guard and ultra athletic. Embiid is a lumbering, injured, 30-year-old big man. So the Knicks allowed Isaiah Hartenstein to defend him one-on-one not necessarily because they thought it would work, but because they thought it would tire him out. The idea was to exhaust him so that when the fourth quarter came, he wouldn't have enough gas left in the tank to take Philly over the top. By the numbers, it was a sound approach:
Embiid closed the series having shot 23.1% from the floor in fourth quarters. Across seven career postseason runs, Embiid has never hit 50% of better of his fourth-quarter field goal attempts. He's not entirely to blame for that. Philadelphia has had a notoriously bad group of backup centers in that stretch, and the 76ers always lose the minutes he rests so badly that he has to play more than he probably should. This series was no exception. Philadelphia finished the series +47 in Embiid's minutes and still somehow lost. He and Maxey were spectacular in the series. The rest of the team, obviously, was not.
But New York's approach in Game 6 whittled that two-man team down to just one. By boxing Maxey out of the offense for three quarters, they made it that much harder for him to find his rhythm in the fourth. In the end, that was just enough for the Knicks to hold off the 76ers and win the series.
And now, Philadelphia will spend the offseason trying to correct that mistake. The 76ers are primed for roughly $65 million in cap space this summer. They can potentially add a third star to help keep Embiid fresh later in playoff games. They could get the right backup center so they don't have to overextend his minutes. Daryl Morey has reached his last chance to make this work with Embiid. As tonight proved, the 76ers simply can't rely on him to win them these games and series by himself.
So much for having the second-best player?
In December, TNT's Kenny Smith infamously said that in "every game [the Knicks] play, they have the second best player." He, in particular, was blasted for that quote, and Brunson himself roasted him a bit after the game. But the sentiment wasn't exactly uncommon. Brunson was a sub-All-Star level sidekick two years ago in Dallas. As spectacular as he was in the 2023 playoffs, people forget that it was actually Julius Randle that earned an All-Star nod from the 2022-23 Knicks. The common belief surrounding Brunson entering this season was that he was a very good player, but not exactly the sort to lead a team to a championship.
Well, he just went into the reigning MVP's building for a closeout game and outscored him in a win. Brunson struggled in the first two games of the series. He scored 39 or more in the next four. He has now scored 519 points in 17 playoff games as a Knick. That's an average of 30.52 points as a nominal No. 1 option on an offense, since he was playing second-fiddle to Luka Doncic in Dallas. That figure would rank him No. 3 all time on the all-time playoff points per game leaderboard behind Michael Jordan and Doncic.
The entire concept of questioning whether "Player X" is good enough to be the best player on a championship team is a somewhat flawed exercise. What kind of roster are we talking about? What kind of injury luck did that team have? Is it a weak or a strong field? Not all of those players are made equal. Isiah Thomas was not as good as Michael Jordan. Giannis Antetokounmpo is not LeBron James.
Brunson, despite the numbers, may not be Jordan or James. But time and time again, he's proven capable of being better than whoever the other team puts up against him. If he could do it against an MVP in this round, who's to say he couldn't do it against anyone else in the league today? With the right teammates and the right luck, Brunson can stand up to just about anyone.
Philadelphia's finest are now New York legends
Brunson's performance speaks for itself. But remember, the Knicks have two more Villanova national champions on their team. Josh Hart made the game-winning 3-pointer tonight. He scored eight points in the last two minutes of Game 1 to seal that one as well, and he got the critical steal of Tyrese Maxey that swung Game 2. Donte DiVincenzo made the game-winning 3-pointer in Game 2. He was Maxey's primary defender in Game 6, in which he was also New York's second-leading scorer with 23 points after playing all 48 minutes.
Philadelphia's professional team was, in essence, beaten by the core of its greatest ever college team. Now Brunson, Hart and DiVincenzo, three of the best collegiate Philadelphia athletes of all time, are making a serious run at New York immortality. If losing this series didn't sting enough already, Philadelphia has also seemingly lost three local icons to its northeastern rival.