The Best Ability is Emotional Availability: The Agony and the Ecstasy of the Joel Embiid and Zion Williamson Experience
A Pelicans fan convinces a Sixers fan to love Embiid for who he isn’t.
The Process, as we all know, has been a toxic and sticky love affair. And just like complex romantic entanglements, it is crucial to process the experience with someone who has a healthy distance and can relate through their own torrid, and maybe also, sticky experiences. Ahead of this weekend’s Fly the Process trip to New Orleans (February 21st @ 7pm), Sixers fan Rebecca Croog (known to longtime listeners as Weekly Becky) chatted with her friend and Pelicans fan Sam Bickford about their common plight of rooting for generationally talented basketball players whose talent is only matched by the sporadic nature of their availability.
Weekly Becky: Sam, I’m super excited to be back in The Blender with you for the Sixers-Pelicans game this weekend. Thank you for your willingness to share with the Ricky community some of your thoughts about one of our favorite NBA topics: the myriad ways that Joel Embiid and Zion Williamson cause us deep suffering.
Joel and Zion share the unique experience of living inside bodies that can do things that bodies like theirs should not be able to do. Brett Brown called Joel “Shaquille O’Neal with soccer feet.” An NBA scout described Zion as having a “body type and ability to jump that defy physics.” At one point in time, we each believed that with the perfect combination of luck, a competent medical staff, and an unflinching commitment to conditioning, these guys were set to transform their respective franchises for years to come and bring championships to cities that either had never seen one — or hadn’t in a very long time…
But that’s not what happened.
When I vent about my Joel-related feelings with most other NBA fans, they tend to respond with a combination of pity and wistfulness. “It’s so sad… to think of what could have been…” that type of thing. With you, it’s different. As a Pelicans fan, you understand my plight on a deeper level, because you share it. You can commiserate. And you often remind me how much worse it could be — the “worse” being your own experience with Zion Williamson. What has the Zion experience been like for you?
Sam Bickford: When Zion hit four threes in his first ever NBA game, the basketball universe could not have felt more open to us. Not only did he showcase what made him the first overall pick: the hustle, the athleticism, the passing, the versatility. But now he was hitting threes? Four of them? The future MVP awards were limitless.
And then that never happened again — he hasn’t even hit a single shot from beyond the arc in all of 2025-26, though occasionally he still takes them, which in Pels world is a case for optimism. What followed that triumphant beginning was broken feet, pulled hamstrings, huffy body language, and a very sad hostage situation between Zion and the entire basketball-loving community of New Orleans reaching its apex this year, with Zion unexpectedly healthy and it mattering very little. While he on occasion shows off the black-hole level gravity and spectacle that made him such an exciting prospect, Zion has largely crashed back to Earth. A good player with flaws on a bad team with bleak future prospects.
When it comes to Zion, it’s hard to love someone who doesn’t love themselves.
At the risk of being belligerently presumptuous, it often feels like Zion Williamson doesn’t love himself.
At the very least, rooting for Zion on the basketball court reveals, as day-to-day life so brutally can, that knowing oneself is a crucial fulcrum of life, both personal and professional. Watching Zion is heavy, imbued with ambiguous expectations, and never feels like enough, even when he’s playing great. You can see it on his face too, after a dunk, a block, a balletic and violent spin into a surreal floater, he always looks a little disappointed. A little expectant: I can do more. That should have been an and-one.
Honestly, the only time he looks happy with himself, and I say this with embarrassing confidence having watched at least 85% of Pelicans games over the last five years, is when he yams the hell out of the ball on a fastbreak dunk. The Smoothie King Center erupts, the other team often calls a timeout, Zion pivots his Mount Olympus sized shoulders to flex his bicep, and often—and this is frequently the only time during a game he does this—he smiles.
The gargantuan expectations I’m placing onto Zion aren’t from nowhere though. The Pelicans (as national media vultures breathlessly report on) are a wayward and sometimes moribound franchise with frugal ownership, fickle fans, and a confusing five-year plan. At the center of that is the prodigy drafted seven years ago who has had, and occasionally still does have, breathtaking moments but has mostly been disappointing and unavailable. The source of the unavailability has been painful: limps into the tunnel turn into months of reevaluating hamstring tightness, oblique strains, knee pain, etc., all compounded by the uncomfortable-yet-nagging suspicion that he doesn’t work hard, doesn’t take his role seriously enough.
In March of 2023, Brandon Ingram, Zion, and CJ McCollum were interviewed by Slam magazine and asked, “Which of you is most likely to become a yoga instructor after your playing career?” BI and Zion begin to make fun of CJ for his wacky yoga positions, his goofy stretching poses. And while I understand the desire to tease CJ (he has a class president swag that’s not for everybody), the irony is thick. During a season when Zion played 29 games, he’s teasing about working toward availability.
Becky: Availability. You have spoken the word that encircles and plagues both Zion and Joel, and by extension, all of us. Joel’s responses to the media and fan discourse around his availability challenges have been pretty all over the place, and have evolved over time. But I can’t say he’s had the type of teasing or dismissive attitude that you claim Zion has.
I hadn’t thought about it this way until now, but I think that Joel naming himself “The Process” so early in his career allowed him to get out in front of all that. It’s like he internalized the availability concerns and criticisms as a central part of his identity, but on his own terms, while at the same time aligning himself with the team’s strategy. In so doing, he was able to take a lot of control of the availability narrative (at least in the beginning).
It seems like Zion never had that opportunity, in part because he began his NBA career actually playing basketball. While Joel missed the entirety of his first two seasons due to injury, Zion played a whopping 85 games over the course of his first two seasons, set the franchise record for fastest player to score 2,000 points, and earned an all-star selection in his second season. So the narrative and emotional arcs were different. Would you agree?
Sam: I’d say that more than the unavailability on the court, the pain as a fan of Zion comes from his emotional unavailability; the sense that he doesn’t understand what is expected of him, how much people are depending on him, how the entire franchise is and has been waiting on him to be accountable. Watching him try and fail to meet his potential would be one thing, but seeing his talent not come to fruition in the form of a stagnating arsenal of moves and a litany of “to be re-evaluated in three weeks” injury reports makes his success feel not only like it didn’t happen, but that maybe it was never meant to be.
He doesn’t need to be a top 20 player, receive consecutive all star berths, or make an All-NBA team, but the Pelicans ecosystem does need him to be accountable, committed and to play within a role. At some point every year, the team waits for Zion’s return, and he always returns as the Sun. The long night is over. And then, nearly without fail, he leaves again, often without explanation, and with his exit the franchise’s trajectory is back in an indeterminate period of night.
Which is why, at the risk of sounding insane, Zion’s failure to take flight allows me to read Joel Embiid’s up-and-down, propulsively chaotic career as an unqualified success. There is accomplishment and recognition to hold on to. He has an MVP! He’s won playoff series (at least one)! He is beloved by fans! He is talked about in national publications as an elite player!
Tell me I’m wrong! Joel has earned your heart, hasn’t he?
Becky: Well yeah, but that’s been part of the torture! Emotional availability is in Joel’s DNA. You’ve said this before, and I agree–it’s very special that despite all of the setbacks, Joel has always openly dared to dream of being great in a way that Zion hasn’t. He vulnerably shared with the world early in his career that he of course wanted to win the MVP one day. And unabashedly, he has not stopped reminding us that a championship for Philadelphia is still the goal.
But the thing about emotional availability is that a person cannot choose which emotions they make available. In the case of Joel, it would be a disservice to the fullness of his humanity to not mention some of the less savory stuff: the shove of a reporter in the locker room, the slumped shoulders on the court, the heated moments with various teammates on the bench, and a very visible lack of urgency in at least a few career/franchise-shifting playoff games.
Ironically, emotional closed-offness is also something that Joel has shared vulnerably about. He’s admitted to not having many friends and that with the friends he does have, he “never tries to get deep into anything.” So, Joel’s emotional world has always felt incredibly complex, and yes he’s made this complexity more known to the public than most NBA players (and certainly Zion) have, but we still only see fragments of it, just enough to remain entrapped in his love. I guess what I’m trying to say is that Joel’s emotional availability is really beautiful, but also complicated, and it can make the management of on-court expectations even harder.
Sam: There’s an aspect to this conversation we haven’t touched on yet, which is that it’s a little perverse and odd for us to be psychoanalyzing some guys we don’t know. I understand that’s a huge part of being a sports fan, at least it always has been for me, but there is a discomfort to it.
In this case though, the evidence isn’t only emotionally inflected, but also expressed on the court. Joel’s desire to ascend the mountain of basketball greatness has seen him improve dramatically! He’s learned to play from the nail more, become a better screen setter and a more disciplined defensive player, figured out how to use his gravity to create more opportunities for his teammates in the pick-and-roll, and not allowed the 73-point performance against a terrible Spurs team be the be-all-end-all of his career.
Zion on the other hand has, and this makes me profoundly upset, shown almost no growth in his game. His passing has maybe even gotten worse, his rebounding effort is uneven, and when the game gets close his refusal to use his right hand for anything renders him if not useless, profoundly limited. In some woo-woo, perhaps over-therapized way, Joel’s desire to be appreciated and recognized has given him the fuel to improve while Zion has… I’m not sure what, but he’s absolutely not improved.
The shadow that hangs over this conversation is one Sixers’ fans are quite familiar with: Ben Simmons. At this point, Zion’s career has more in common with Ben’s than it does with Joel’s — and so when your or other members of the Philly faithful struggle to appreciate Joel, there’s always the Fashion Week-loving skeleton in your own closet to restore gratitude for what you do have.
Becky: I cannot deny that the unfriendly ghost of Simmo the Savage has haunted me for this conversation, but that is a whole other case study in comparative suffering that we will have to save for another day, perhaps ahead of a future Fly the Process: Australia Sport Fishing Edition.
Please let’s get back to you convincing me to forever feel nothing but unconditional love toward Joel Embiid. Are you basically saying that what the Zion-Joel comparative analysis reveals is that the best ability is emotional availability?
Sam: That is exactly what I’m saying.
Becky: I love that. I wonder what Mike will think of this woo-woo revision of his least favorite basketball-related expression.
Sam, I’m sorry that Zion never opened up to the city of New Orleans the way you all deserve! I would be remiss if I didn’t say that his tomahawk dunk against Minnesota will forever stand out as one of the coolest things I have witnessed live on a basketball court. Remember?! We both jumped out of our seats, and I swear I saw a tiny glimmer of hope left in your eyes.
What are the chances that either of them even plays on Saturday, when all of us Fly the Process Ricky sickos descend upon your humble arena?
Sam: Probably close to zero, meaning that this article is perhaps yet another instance of us putting way too much energy into something with very little reward.
Becky: The psychosis continues! Thanks for the chat. See ya Saturday.
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