Can Joel Embiid Ever Break the Cycle as a Sixer?
He wants it all here, and he ends up not really getting any of it. Eventually, he might wonder if the "here" part is the one that needs to change.
Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.
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You had to be a little envious of Nuggets fans watching Nikola Jokic in the All-Star Game. Not because his play was all that brilliant -- he made some nice passes, missed one awful-looking three, whiffed on an are you kidding me? alley-oop attempt and shrugged a whole lot. But because he played 20 low-stress minutes, sat the entire fourth quarter, tried only when he felt like it and left the court more concerned about his post-game dinner plans than anything that happened on the floor. Meanwhile, our Joel Embiid played 27:30 (including the entire fourth quarter), carried Team LeBron during the third while the squad's namesake was busy playing UNO with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone in the locker room, and even tried to inspire his team to D up down the stretch before correctly deeming it a lost cause. All of this, of course, after warning he might sit out the game entirely with his sore foot, and all of this, of course, in a losing effort. "Low-stress" didn't exactly cover Joel's minutes in that one.
Really, though, no minutes for Joel Embiid are ever low-stress. He is in a permanent state of toiling to hit one NBA benchmark after the other, with each pursuit making the ones before and after it that much more challenging. He needs rest, but the NBA schedule offers little, and he'll never optionally make up the difference himself. It's a spin cycle that he sometimes seems to be doomed to be stuck in forever -- of at least, as long as he's a Sixer -- and we might be in trouble if he can't break it soon.
The reason Joel kills himself to stand out in the All-Star Game is the same reason he kills himself to produce in the regular season -- because he's never gotten the validation from his peers and the national audience that he craves. The reason he's never gotten that validation is because his team constantly flames out early in the playoffs. A large part of the reason his team constantly flames out early in the playoffs is that he's never fully healthy for the postseason. And a large part of the reason he's never healthy for the postseason is because he kills himself to play as much as possible in every single regular season game (and even the All-Star Game) leading up to the playoffs. It is the most vicious of vicious circles, and it always seems to end up back at heartbreak.
For a minute, it looked like this season might be different. Jo's health looked shaky to start, as he missed eight of the Sixers' first 20 games and the team limped out to a 12-12 record. He'd already claimed he wasn't concerned with the MVP this year, and from his and the team's beginning to the season, it looked like it was basically a moot point anyway. But then the Sixers got hot, they went into the break winners of 27 of their last 33, a couple MVP hopefuls dropped out of the race with bigger injuries, and Joel's own superlative play elbowed its way back into The Conversation. Now the Sixers are back in the thick of the East playoff race, gunning for a top-two seed while Jo is hunting that MVP once again, and he's going to have to play a whole lot of minutes every night post-All-Star break (as the team's schedule just gets harder and harder) to keep both the team and himself in contention. And in all likelihood, he's going to end up falling just a bit short of both goals anyway.
Don't get me wrong -- I love this about Joel. It might be my favorite thing about rooting for him. I love that he can't play in an exhibition game without still finding ways to pad his scoring at every opportunity, that he watches Jayson Tatum and Donovan Mitchell lighting it up from three on the other team and it kills him so much that he can't resist doing something about it. I love that he plays in the second game of a back-to-back against Brooklyn that he should really sit because he couldn't live with wasting an opportunity to potentially bury Ben Simmons below the tracks of the Atlantic Avenue Q stop. I love that he cares about every single round-number stat, about every potential end-of-season (or even end-of-week) accolade, every opportunity to put his imprint on the NBA in a way that is even slightly unignorable and undeniable. It's the way I am as a fan; I celebrate every little win he puts in the books and I fucking die a little bit every time he misses a meaningless late-game three that would've given him an even 40 or 50 for the night. I'm sure it's the way I would be as a player, too.
But I'm getting a little afraid of what happens if this season ends with another second-round loss, another MVP third-place or runner-up finish, even another All-Star Game loss. He might not have it in him to ever take the foot of the accelerator in the regular season -- even when said foot has him questionable on the injury report before every game -- and he might never make it to the postseason with enough gas still left to get the job done for us. If so, maybe the variable that needs to change for him is the "us," where he angles his way to a superteam that maybe can hold onto 20-point leads in the fourth quarter, can spell him for a few games at a time without his loss being seismic, can secure playoff positioning early enough to not need every W down the stretch, can maybe even win two or three playoff series in the same postseason. I don’t think it’ll necessary happen, but the thought haunts me more than any other with the Sixers; I'd probably rather spend the next eight years losing in the second round than have to face the prospect of playing even one game at the not-WFC with Joel Embiid coming out of the visitors' tunnel.
I'm getting ahead of myself here of course -- the Sixers have been great for two months, Joel's injury probably isn't actually all that serious, this might still be the best shot we've had to do real damage in the playoffs since Aaron McKie and George Lynch roamed the Earth. But for all the reasons that the Sixers are under pressure to perform this postseason, I think the biggest one is just showing Joel that not every season here has to end the same way, with him trying to do everything and ending up just short of doing much of anything. Get him to the conference finals, and maybe next year he can be the dude riding the pine during the ASG's dumbass fourth quarter, wondering if there'll still be time for him to order room service when he gets back to the hotel.