Welcomes and Goodbyes: Spike Returns to the Corner Three

A look around the league and around the Ricky, plus Spike's sad farewell to a fixture of the Philly sports community.

Before I get started here, I’d like to thank Zo for his service to the Ricky over the last several years (salute emoji). Zo has been and will be a cherished member of the Ricky family for as long as the Ricky exists (forever). Only Zo and Mike have had tweets that were the direct inspiration for Ricky shirts. People forget that. Toast a Surfside to Zo’s legendary run with the Corner Three.

That said, I’ll be handling this for the time being. So if you don’t get enough of me with two Ricky episodes, five four hour radio shows, and a Carl Landry Record Club pod every week, well then, you’re in luck. And with that, we’re off…

Team Ricky

Over the years, I believe the Ricky has been either directly or indirectly responsible for both good and bad things that happened to the Sixers. Welcome Beckett Sanderson to the club. Beckett wrote this excellent data-deep-dive on Jared McCain’s struggles this year, and he instantly woke up and delivered.

We celebrated Embiid’s first alley-oop in years on the pod, made some Doc Rivers jokes, and Mike had to pick between trading Kelly Oubre and Quentin Grimes.

Chuck Klosterman is my favorite writer ever, which I’ve mentioned incessantly. I was lucky enough to do an event with him at the Midtown Scholar bookstore in Harrisburg for his new book Football, and the entire event was recorded. You can watch/listen if you’d like.

Mutlu and I do a music podcast called The Carl Landry Record Club. You’re only allowed to listen if you truly love music. This week, we talked about Van Morrison’s legendary album Moondance and a new song from 5 Seconds Of Summer.

Stuff I Read And What I Think Of It

“League sources say Philadelphia, furthermore, has not contacted Milwaukee about a possible Antetokounmpo deal in the wake of a better-than-expected first half, but The Stein Line has learned that the prospect of teaming up with Tyrese Maxey — who, like Giannis, works with prominent NBA trainer Drew Hanlen — does have the 76ers on Antetokounmpo’s radar.”

That’s from Marc Stein and Philly’s own Jake Fischer in Thursday’s newsletter.

Here’s a few things I know for sure – 1) There is no way Giannis is going to be available and Daryl Morey won’t call. 2) Sixers fans are going to convince themselves they can put together a deal for Giannis that doesn’t include VJ Edgecombe. 3) I would be insanely surprised if the combination of Paul George, all three available picks (and maybe Jared McCain) is enough to get the job done. It would almost certainly have to include VJ Edgecombe.

I think Morey would do it unless ownership told him not to. I know we’d all say we don’t want them to do it because the future is always sexier than the present and hope is always more fun than expectations. It would hurt to lose Edgecombe after one half of one season, but can you imagine the first home game when Matt Cord is announcing Giannis? The roof would lift off the place. He’s one of the three best players in the NBA and one of the 15 best players of all time. You’d have to do it.

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The NBA has a new stat called “Gravity.” I don’t have any deep insight into this aside from the fact that I love looking at stats and sorting them and trying to find something interesting. You can play with it here.

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Stephen Noh with the Sporting News built a model that tells him how much a player is worth vs. what he’s paid. He uses the DARKO stat as the base of it. The tool itself is pretty cool. Much like the Gravity stat, it’s fun to just plug players in and see how they stack up.

In any case, Noh ranked the 11 worst contracts in the league, and of course our guy was ranked as the #1 worst contract in the NBA (using this tool). Noh says about Embiid:

Embiid is one of the toughest players to project because of his health. He’s on pace to play 46 games and average 30 minutes per game at the halfway point of this year. Even that modest total seems optimistic for his future given his chronic knee issue, but that’s what I put him down for over the course of his contract.

Embiid is still at a strong level of play. DARKO has him playing like an All-Star, which sounds about right. After starting the year off very slowly and looking hobbled, he’s averaged 28.9 points per game since Dec. 12.

The issue for Embiid though is that he’s the second-highest paid player in the league behind Stephen Curry. He needs to play like an MVP candidate in order to justify his enormous salary. And at age 31, he will be declining every year while his contract rises.

At $100 million over four years, Embiid would be properly paid given how much time he misses. At $244 million, he’s one of the worst contracts in the league.

What do I think? Well it’s not my money. The fact is I feel about Joel like most of us feel about Joel. The best Sixers player I’ve ever seen, a blessing that he’s back playing well again, can kinda tell he’s not really doing it on defense and perpetually worried about seeing the tweet that he’s out for 2 weeks due to fluid in his knee. I’m probably more vocal about the last part of it but I doubt I feel it any more than anyone else.

Would the Real Jared McCain Please Stand Up?

The Last Word

Dan McQuade died this week. I’m pretty sad about it.

If you didn’t know Dan, it’s sort of hard to describe him simply, but he was one of the OG Philadelphia Sports Twitter people from back in the day when it was fun. Think the Meech/Cranekicker era. Dan wrote for Philly Mag, then Deadspin, and then Defector.

I would be lying if I said I was super close to Dan, but I did know and like him very much, and most of our relationship was exchanging messages about the Sixers, bootleg T-shirts, weird South Philly sports bars, Color Star and strange Philly sports stories. I went back through all of our messages since 2011 when I found out he passed away, and it made me smile to know someone so specific existed and I knew him. The last time we talked he told me he wanted to talk to me about a book he’s writing about shopping malls. Unfortunately we never got to have that chat.

Dan was creative, smart, kind, and one of us. He announced he had cancer last year. He was 43 years old when he died, and he leaves behind a two year-old son as well as his wife. He does leave us with a lot of content to smile at when we read it.

Love you buddy. You made the world a better place.