76ers 119, Knicks 108: Gods and monsters
The Knicks tried to mount a roundball Ragnarok, but the apocalypse came up short
Julius Randle is one of the 30 best basketball players alive. His second All-Star selection in three years makes that point succinctly. Think about how good you have to be at something to be top-30 in the whole world. Jalen Brunson should be an All-Star this year, too, even if it appears the NBA will name anybody and everybody else as injury replacements ahead of him. Last night in Philadelphia, the two combined for 60 points on 59/47/88 shooting, monstrous production and efficiency. Yet the New York Knicks fell, 119-108.
One reason they lost: the 76er reserves doubled the Knick bench’s point total, thanks in large part to Tyrese Maxey pouring in 27 in just 33 minutes. The biggest reason they lost is the oldest reason any basketball team at any level ever loses: the other team had the biggest person on the floor, who was also the best. That’s how we make sense of our world. It’s the same in our mythologies: for every monstrous Lotan, Tiamat, Vrtra or Jörmungandr, there was a bigger, badder god – Baal, Marduk, Indra, Thor – who took them down to the low post and gave them the business.
Clarissa explained it all, but Joel Embiid — one of the handful of best players alive — did it all last night, and with a nod to the great centers of years gone by he did it entirely inside the arc and at the free throw line, controlling the paint and the glass. The man even dished six assists.
In this end-to-end sequence Embiid forces Brunson to miss, races the length of the court for the trailing dunk and finishes with an injury-risk dismount that had gawkers gasping all the way from Cedar Park to Cameroon.
One of the gods’ deepest secrets is how derivative they are. Our most revered pantheons are as unoriginal as Weezer’s cover of “Toto” (not sharing a link ‘cuz it sucks). Any god you’ve ever heard of is likely a sequel to some long-forgotten Mesopotamian deity who hailed from some Sumerian intellectual property which plagiarized some poor Proto-Euphratean divinity. And yet I don’t think we experience this truth as troubling. The best stories endure and evolve to help the new world struggle into being. Embiid’s game, interestingly enough, has more than a few notes you may recognize from the last basketball god who played for the Knicks.
New York’s loss may have been prophetic. They’re now four games behind the Brooklyn Nets with 25 games left. In light of the Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving trades, the Nets are the popular choice as the top-six team most likely to fall in the standings; should they do so, and should the Knicks pass them in the standings, the ‘bockers would bypass the play-in chaos and be assured a postseason berth. But the math is unkind: if the Nets go 12-15 the rest of the way, the Knicks would have to go 15-10 or better to pass them. 12-15 is the same winning percentage as the Lakers have this year; 15-10 is closer to the Grizzlies’ level.
If the Knicks finish sixth through eighth, our lovable monsters are going to go up against a team led by a god. A healthy Mitchell Robinson might lead the Fates to grant the Knicks a little more string before it’s cut, but odds are what happened last night is what’s going to happen four times out of five or six in April: the Knicks will play well for a while, maybe even lead late in the game. But whether Jayson Tatum’s game descends from Kobe Bryant’s, or Giannis Antetokounmpo is a leaner Shaquille O’Neal, or Embiid is Melo on one end and Dikembe Mutombo on the other doesn’t ultimately matter. The old NBA is dying and the new league is struggling to be born; now is the time of gods and monsters. The Knicks have done well in accumulating the latter. Until they find the former, Olympus remains out of reach.
