CAMDEN, N.J. — The task for 76ers point guard Tyrese Maxey Monday night wasn’t to forget the disheartening final moments of a 104-101 Game 2 loss to the New York Knicks. It was to convince his mom to do so.
Maxey is used to calming his dad down. But when he and the Sixers came back from Madison Square Garden, the place of several confirmed refereeing errors in the final seconds that helped the Knicks turn a 101-96 deficit into a 2-0 series lead, Maxey had made his peace with the final sequence. But his mom was having a hard time doing the same.
“I was the one consoling my mom,” Maxey said Wednesday morning at the Sixers training facility. “It was amusing. It was like, ‘Mom, it’s OK, you’ve got to let it go.’”
That’s the team-wide challenge ahead of Thursday’s Game 3. The 76ers are in a deep hole after consecutive close games in New York. They led the Knicks in the fourth quarter of each, none more dramatically than seeing New York score the final eight points to win Game 2.
But focusing on the losses won’t help them on Thursday night at Wells Fargo Center.
Coach Nick Nurse stuck to his usual routine of letting the disappointment sink in and then setting it aside.
“Clock hit midnight after that game, and I moved on,” he said. “I always give it till midnight, and I move on.”
Tuesday’s disclosure by the NBA of refereeing mistakes – that the Knicks’ Jalen Brunson had grabbed Maxey’s jersey, that Josh Hart made contact in what should’ve been a foul that led to a Maxey turnover with 16.1 seconds left, that Nurse should’ve been granted a timeout when frantically signaling in the ensuing scramble before Donte DiVincenzo’s go-ahead 3-pointer – did little to reopen the wounds.
The NBA’s report didn’t change the fact that the Sixers did enough to win Game 2, or that they led Game 1 for four minutes of the fourth quarter before a 111-104 loss.
“Stuff happens,” Nurse said. “I’ve been in a lot of games, and stuff happens. I thought we played really well. I thought we played well enough to win. Obviously, the closing seconds of the game cost us the game. However it went down, it went down. Nothing’s going to change that now.”
Maxey absorbed the NBA officiating report as a small amount of validation, given that he was at the center of the missed calls. But he knows that nothing the team does Thursday will retroactively win them Game 2. It’s all about the next 48 minutes of basketball and getting on the board in the series.
“I think what it did for us is give us reassurance,” he said of the report. “We’ve got to use that and put it as fuel to the fire. It is what it is. We’re down 2-0. If we dwell on it, we’re going to be down 0-3. But we can’t dwell on it. We’ve got to go out there and do what we know we’re capable of doing.”
