Knicks have too much at stake in Game 4 to get caught up in lingering Joel Embiid silliness

PHILADELPHIA — The easy thing is to feed the beast. There is some rawness and some rancor in this series now. There are some hard feelings and some hurt egos. The Knicks are a team forged by ferocity, tempered by toughness, and now there is a silly sense in the air that if they don’t get even with Joel Embiid, Corleone-style, that maybe they aren’t as stolid as we thought.

There is too much at stake to get dragged into this nonsense. There is the work of a season on the table right now, and if the Knicks are still in the better spot than the Sixers, up 2-1 and halfway to the second round, that can all go poof with 48 minutes of folly and foolishness Sunday.

“You adjust to how the game is being called,” coach Tom Thibodeau said Saturday afternoon, 24 hours before the Knicks and the 76ers would meet for Game 4 of what is beckoning an increasingly heated and entertaining series. “It’s not an easy job, I understand that. I just want consistency. So if it’s good, hard competition, great.”

That ought to be enough. In some precincts, it isn’t enough. In those precincts — the same ones where, in summer, there is routine demand for fastballs thrown at heads every time a batter is brushed back — they want more. They want Thibodeau to summon Jericho Sims, or some such member from the back of the Knicks’ reserves, and get even with Embiid for his borderline ejection-able (and undoubtedly objectionable) take-down of Mitchell Robinson on Friday night. Any method of payback is fine in those corridors of conspiracy — a tire iron to the back of Embiid’s knee, perhaps, or maybe a Louisville slugger.

Maybe just skip the niceties and toss Embiid in the Schuylkill River, where he can sleep with the fishes.

The Knicks, by reason and by reputation, are too smart to get caught up in this. It is here that we go back to the same theme, the same mantra that has carried them along all season long: They don’t dwell. They don’t linger on bad breaks and bad news. They almost never allow one bad loss to affect the next game.