NEW YORK — Among the many talents packed into his titanic frame, it appears Isaiah Hartenstein has a rather gargantuan gift for understatement.
“There was a lot going on, to be honest,” the Knicks center said after New York survived Game 2 — and there really is no other word for it, or at least, no descriptor more accurate — to take a 2-0 lead on the 76ers in a physical, intense and thrilling best-of-seven opening-round series.
That, friends, is an exceedingly restrained and sober summation of this:
Jalen Brunson — he of the 15-for-54 shooting line through the first 95 and a half minutes of this series — tries to drive on opposite number Kyle Lowry, only to wind up on the ground in a heap. Once the ball comes loose to Donte DiVincenzo, Brunson gets up and sprints to the corner for a relocation 3-pointer; he has to give a hard-charging Tyrese Maxey a pump-fake and side-step just to be able to get it off, and watches it bounce hard off the rim and go straight up … before falling gently through the net, drawing the Knicks within two, and winnowing what must have been roughly 4 billion synapses firing in his brain down to one single thought.
“Get a steal,” Brunson said after the game. “Do whatever you gotta do to get a steal. Find a way.”
The way: Teaming with Josh Hart and draping themselves all over Maxey in a shoving/clutching/grabbing baseline tightrope walk that ended with the Sixers’ All-Star point guard — who was a game-time decision due to illness, and who wound up playing 44 tough-as-nails minutes — unable to hold onto Lowry’s inbounds pass.
“I just tried to grab the ball,” Maxey said. “I mean, I’m just trying to get the ball, throw it inbounds. It was hard for me to catch it. I had to sweep through, it comes out, I jump up there and get the ball again. Tried my best.”
His efforts ended with both him and the ball on the deck. Hart — the kind of player that Knicks coach Tom Thibodeau says “gives the team toughness, real toughness” and just “makes things happen” — came away with the loose ball and fired it out to DiVincenzo, waiting all alone on the left wing,…
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