Kristian Winfield: Knicks sweep 76ers in embarrassing takeover of Philly’s home court
PHILADELPHIA — This isn’t how home-court advantage is supposed to work. It’s supposed to benefit the team wearing the hometown colors, not the players visiting so-called hostile territory. But New York is only a 90-minute ride from Xfinity Mobile Arena, which — as of Sunday at approximately 3:40 p.
m. — no longer belongs to Josh Harris and David Blitzer’s Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment. It now belongs to the New York Knicks.
And so, apparently, do the Philadelphia 76ers. The Knicks dusted off the belt they used in their 51-point first-round elimination game against the Atlanta Hawks and applied it again with force in a 144-114 rout to complete a 4-0 second-round sweep of the Philadelphia 76ers. For the second straight season, the Knicks are headed to the Eastern Conference finals.
Only this time, there was no resistance. Not from a Sixers team that surrendered 80 first-half points. Not from a Philadelphia fan base badly outnumbered in its own building in Game 3 before barely showing up for Game 4.
Maybe the Sixers players mentally booked their flights from Madison Square Garden East to Cancun before tipoff, because in the blink of an eye, they were down 20 in the first quarter and trailed by nearly 30 for most of the afternoon. This was never a home game for Philadelphia. The arena fell silent when Joel Embiid drilled a second-quarter 3, then erupted when Karl-Anthony Towns answered with one on the other end.
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