NEW YORK — Tyrese Maxey could feel the pit in his gut growling, growing, deepening. He knew how bad it was, and how much worse it was about to get. He could almost reach out and touch the nightmares — the ones he wouldn’t be able to shake, the ones he’d be having for weeks. Maybe months. Maybe longer.
When you’re the kind of kid who aces every test, every mistake cuts you to the core, and there Maxey sat, a half-minute away from the end of the line, awash in slashes of the red pen. Philadelphia was down by six in the fourth quarter of Game 5 — just 28.9 seconds separating the Knicks from advancing to the second round of the 2024 NBA playoffs, and the Sixers from yet another disappointing early postseason exit to cap a season that had begun with such grand, glittering hopes.
As he had through the first four games of this knockdown, drag-out opening-round series, Maxey had, on balance, been brilliant: 34 points on 14-for-24 shooting, eight assists against two turnovers, the offensive engine the Sixers needed with Joel Embiid struggling beneath an accumulation of ailments — soreness in his surgically repaired left knee, migraines, Bell’s palsy — that had sapped the MVP’s shot-making sting.
But Maxey wasn’t thinking about any of those makes, any of those dimes, any of those hiccup-quick slaloms through layer after layer of the Knicks’ perimeter defense. All he could think about were the ones he’d gotten wrong.
“I mean, I … I’m a happy guy, but I absolutely hate losing,” Maxey said. “Especially when it’s certain times — like, I missed three free throws, crucial free throws, and then I turned the ball over late. You know, people don’t see me upset, but I was really upset, and I just wanted to go out there and make up for it for my teammates, man.
“I feel like I played pretty well the whole game, and for us to lose a game like that — end the season like that — I would have been crushed.”
So Maxey did the only thing you can do to end a nightmare: He woke back up, scoring seven of his career-playoff-high 46 points in that final 28.9 seconds to save the Sixers’ season.
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