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Brand, Iguodala lead 76ers past Knicks

If you wanted some good 76ers basketball, you either had to be there early or you had to stay late.

Elton Brand scored a game-high 33 points against the Knicks, his highest total ever as a Sixer. (Ron Cortes / Staff Photographer)
Elton Brand scored a game-high 33 points against the Knicks, his highest total ever as a Sixer. (Ron Cortes / Staff Photographer)Read more

If you wanted some good 76ers basketball, you either had to be there early or you had to stay late.

Because during Friday night's 100-98 victory over the New York Knicks, the Sixers put the good stuff on the ends and sandwiched the bad in the middle.

Who needs consistency when the highs are so high?

The Sixers scored 35 points in the first quarter and 27 in the fourth. Across the middle two quarters, the Sixers scored just 38 points and made only 12 field goals.

After closing down what was a 10-point Sixers lead, the Knicks' Shawne Williams missed a baseline runner at the buzzer.

The Sixers improved to 23-26. The Knicks dropped to 25-24.

After entering the fourth quarter trailing by 82-73, the Sixers pretended like it was the first quarter again and rattled off a Wells Fargo Center-shaking run. By the time the Knicks called time-out with 3 minutes, 13 seconds left in the game, the Sixers were ahead by 96-86 and had everyone high-fiving the person next to them.

They'd gone on a 23-4 run which included 11 straight points.

For the Sixers, Elton Brand finished with 33 points and 17 rebounds, and Andre Iguodala scored 18 points and dished out 16 assists.

This game began abnormally: The Sixers' starters did the scoring and dishing, and the Sixers' reserves tried to not give away the gains. At the end of the first quarter, Iguodala had done a game's worth of diming and Brand had amassed a game's worth of points.

Really.

Iguodala went to the bench with 2:40 left in the first quarter and already had nine assists, tied with three other players for the franchise's single-quarter record. Brand went to the bench with eight seconds left in the first, having scored 19 points on 7-for-8 shooting from the field, with most of those baskets assisted by Iguodala.

All of this prolific passing and scoring gave the Sixers a 35-21 lead at the end of the first quarter. Midway through the second, they'd given it all back. With 6:20 left in the second quarter, Sixers coach Doug Collins had to go back to Iguodala and Brand in hopes they could stop the bleeding.

On a corner three-pointer by Danilo Gallinari with 5:51 left in the half, the Knicks trailed by only 39-38. A transition slam by Timofey Mozgov a few seconds later gave the Knicks their first lead of the game.

The Knicks fans inside the Wells Fargo Center, of which their were many, became loud.

In that second quarter, the Sixers' production mirrored that of Iguodala and Brand. The pair plummeted to earth and so did their team. In the second, Iguodala had two assists, Brand had two points, and the Knicks outscored the Sixers, 31-16.

In the first half, Sixers' reserves, who often outscore the starters, had scored just six points, all of them from Thaddeus Young. As a unit, the reserves shot 3 for 7 in the first half, taking very few shots and receiving very few minutes.