Joel Embiid shows why he’s still daunting Knicks challenge even at less than 100 percent

Time after time, trip after trip, he would tug at his shorts. He would sigh. He’d stretch out his leg. He’d double over at the waist. Time after time, trip after trip, Joel Embiid looked like was about to call 911, call for an EMT to tend to what seemed to be a million multiple miseries.

And time after time, trip after trip, Embiid did something to drag the Philadelphia 76ers closer to the main draw of the NBA playoffs, closer to a date Saturday night at Madison Square Garden. He’d drive, and he’d finish. He’d find an open teammate. He’d hit the offensive glass, make the follow-up, make the foul shot after he was fouled. He’d knock down an open 3. And then another.

Somehow, at the end of a game that seemed destined for another of those unbearable studies in Heat Culture, at the end of a season when he spent 34 games as the league’s clear-cut MVP, then disappeared for two months, then returned to lead a late-season push, here was Embiid. Here he was, playing at maybe 65 percent efficiency, putting his foot down. Refusing to let the Sixers lose.

“When you have him on your side,” Tyrese Maxey said, “you like your chances.”

The numbers were relatively ordinary by his advanced standards — 23 points, 15 rebounds in 38 minutes — but when you speak of a force like Embiid in the dying minutes of a game like this, the numbers only tell the preamble of the story.

Time after time, trip after trip, he seemed on the verge of passing out. He looked the way Jim Brown used to look on all those Sundays in the 1950s and ’60s when defenses would stalk him all over Cleveland Municipal Stadium, pounding him and piling on him. Brown would sometimes look like he had to be peeled off the field, or carried off it on a stretcher. Then he would rise, to a knee, then to two feet, and he would stagger to the huddle, then limp to the backfield, then take a handoff and mow down six tacklers for a 17-yard gain.