How Do You Root for a Team Whose Best Player Might Aways Be a Question Mark?
AU looks at a triumphant win on Sunday that still probably left fans unsettled and confused.
I kept my expectations extremely reasonable for Joel Embiid's return to the lineup against the Chicago Bulls on Sunday. First off, I didn't allow myself to believe he was actually playing until he was announced as part of the starting five, and then I assumed we'd only get 25 minutes of him looking rusty as shit, helping the team in some ways but hurting them in just as many, and generally seeming a couple games away from being a couple games away. And sure enough, he missed all of his first seven shots, had a couple out-of-sync turnovers and blown defensive rotations and generally was a mess in the first quarter. It hurt to watch, but at least I was ready for it. It'd probably take a week for him to look anywhere near his usual self again, I figured. Maybe more.
Instead, it took a quarter. He hit one short jumper in the early second, and all of a sudden, he was off, hitting tough turnaround jumpers, drawing fouls, executing the pick-and-short-roll perfectly with Tyrese Maxey, and even getting a clear lane to the basket a couple times and finishing at the rim. He also tightened up on his passing, started moving better and more effectively on defense, blocked a couple shots and generally anchored the team on both sides of the ball. He scored 19 points in the second quarter alone after going scoreless in the first, ultimately finishing with 31 and 12 and a +16 in an eight-point win. He looked awesome. He looked dominant. He looked like Joel Embiid.
It should have been a triumphant moment for Sixers fans -- and it was. It was Philly's fourth win in five games, officially marking positive momentum for the team for the first time all season, and the first full game that Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey all both started and finished for the Ballers this year. But as great as it all was to see, it was all equally confusing. Because we don't know for sure when, or if, we're going to see it again this season. We don't know anything for sure about anything that involves Joel Embiid, and we really never may again. He might just be a question mark forever now.
One thing I think we're all realizing through different points throughout this season is that while we thought our history with Joel's myriad injuries and health concerns and general shuffling in and out of the lineup would prepare us for this season, we're actually in totally new territory here with Jo. Previously, the Big Man was often hurt, but when he was hurt, there was always at least a timetable for him getting better; maybe sometimes it was either more conservative or more reckless than we would have liked, but it came with a goal of (temporarily) clean health to work towards: If Joel does this, then soon enough he'll be good to go. And then it was a perpetually terrifying state of waiting for the next thing to go wrong with him -- but at least at that point, we were working from a place of rightness.
But there is no "right" with Joel Embiid anymore. At least, not a "right" that we know to be imminent, a "right" that he can clearly and inexorably work towards through some combination of rest and rehabilitation. He has recurring swelling and pain in his knee, and nobody seems to know how to deal with it. Nobody seems to really know if there's a way to deal with it. And if you were able to convince yourself that him being out there and performing at an MVP level against Chicago meant it was Problem Solved for Joel, his despairing postgame quotes took a sledgehammer to such delusions: "I've been saying it for the last few months. It's been extremely depressing. It's something that hasn't been figured out, and it's been extremely annoying, because I would love to play every single game."
It was a strange feeling watching Embiid's brilliance against the Bulls on Sunday, knowing that as well as he was playing, it didn't necessarily mean much beyond the fact that winning that exact game was going to be a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Maybe his playing in this game meant he would also be able to play in the Sixers' next game, but maybe it wouldn't. Maybe his reaction to playing in this game meant he would be out for weeks to follow. Maybe this was as good as we'd see Joel Embiid this season, and we'd never see him this good again. We don't know. He doesn't know. Nick Nurse certainly doesn't fucking know. Not even the Tony Rich Project knows. And we might not know his full prognosis all season -- never for more than one game at a time.
But the other thing that we were reminded of on Sunday was that even a permanently game-by-game Joel Embiid will always be worth waiting around for. The team had been such a mess, and Embiid so far off his game, during his abortive four-game start earlier in the season that we were able to forget just what a fundamentally transformative lift his presence gives this team. You don't properly appreciate how much he elevates the offense until you watch them struggling just to make something out of every half-court possession for a month and a half. The way his and Maxey's pick-and-roll generates clear looks for both of them and opens up the entire offense around them -- compared to Maxey getting trapped 30 feet from the basket and/or throwing the ball at Andre Drummond's knees -- is basically seeing in color for the first time after a lifetime of black and white.
I'd been able to sorta talk myself into the Paul George- and Tyrese Maxey-led version of this team being the True 2024-25 Sixers, and that anything we got from Joel this season would just be a bonus: That was the emotionally safer way to look at things, and I came to believe that version of the team could still be interesting, competitive, good. After all, we'd gotten some breaks on the margins -- Guerschon Yabusele was a steal, Jared McCain a godsend, even KJ Martin some degree of revelation -- and Paul George had been a majorly stabilizing force, leading the team to a 3-0 record in the prior three games he played in before Sunday. Maybe they wouldn't even need Joel Embiid to turn their season around, I was thinking.
And today I realize what a stupid thing that was to think. Not even that it's necessarily incorrect -- the team had looked significantly different with George and Maxey healthy and largely clicking the past four games, and it's very possible that just with the two of them leading the way this team could still make a real push to get back into the playoff picture. But would they be able to good-enough their way through four straight playoff series at that point? Would they be able to get through one? Unclear, and unencouraging. Joel is the thing that raises this team from "should reliably beat bad teams and challenge good ones" to "actual championship contender," and there's virtually no chance of any path we take leading us to the latter one without him contributing in a major, major way.
But that means we've got a long, long road ahead of us this season, longer in every way than every other season of the Process so far. Not only do we still have to fight our way back into the East's top 10 -- even with our scorching, 2016 Warriors-esque run of four wins in five games, we're still 12th in the conference, a game and a half out of the play-in -- we have to do so with no real clue of what this team is going to look like game to game. Will we have Embiid? If we do, will he be playing through such pain that it looks like he might consider retiring every time he has to change ends of the court? Will he be playing his way into game shape or playing his way out of availability? And if we don't have him, will he be back in a week, a month, a year? We might not know the answers to any of these questions until we're actually watching him play (or not) that night. We might not even know it then.
That's a tough fucking way to watch a basketball team, and it might genuinely be too much to ask for a lot of us. But if nothing else... folks have been getting so used to the idea of life without Joel that some of us have even started to talk reckless about the team maybe being better off without him. And Sunday's game was hopefully a reminder that as low as the chances currently feel that this thing can actually work out with Joel this season, he's still too good to trade, too good to shut down, too good to not do absolutely everything that we can possibly do within our power to maximize to the fullest of whatever time we can get with Joel on the court, even if it's ultimately not that much, even if it's ultimately compromised whenever it is. He's that great. He's that important. He's that Joel goddamn Embiid. And a Joel that's a permanent question mark still beats out any period, comma or exclamation mark we could ever hope to replace him with.
Andrew Unterberger 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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