Embiid still off his game, Heat resume control of playoff series
The news dripped during the week, interesting a few, shocking almost no one and putting the 76ers in position to make it work for them.
Despite a campaign unlike any in Philadelphia pro sports history — the Wells Fargo Center scoreboard prompting fans for weeks to scream “M-V-P, M-V-P” whenever he went to the line — Joel Embiid would again finish behind Nikola Jokic in the voting.
For what he did for the Sixers, Embiid should have won the plaque. But it was too close to call the results unfair, corrupt or disturbing. The difference between the best center in the West and the best center in the East is slim.
So deal.
That’s what Doc Rivers basically told the Sixers Tuesday afternoon. He told them — and more to the point, he advised Embiid — to use the election results as a trampoline to reach the real prize.
“I was surprised by it,” Rivers told reporters in Miami, after a morning walkthrough. “I thought Joel would win. But let’s win ‘It.’ Then, everything else will follow.”
Though Jokic has never won ‘It’ — the world championship — Rivers’ greater point was reasonable. Simply, should the Sixers ever win a title, or play for one, then the individual prizes will follow. They may even begin to gain more ballot-box respect if they ever reach a conference final series, a goal they have been strangely unable to attain even with the player they still believe is the world’s foremost basketball force. But hours after that advice from Rivers, the Sixers made even that hope less attainable, falling, 120-85, to the Miami Heat in Game 5 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series.
They are one loss from another too-early summer.
Appreciating the recent James Harden reminder that the series won’t really begin until a home team loses a game, the Sixers are not in disastrous straits. They will return Thursday to the Wells Fargo Center, where they likely will be favored to win and could level the series at 3-3 before returning to Miami for a one-game opportunity to advance. Somebody had to be ahead, 3-2, after five games. Turns out it was the one that played three home games. So, there’s that.
There is also something else, something that should be more alarming to the Sixers, something that has come to threaten everything they have tried to build through every minute of Embiid’s eight-year career.
There’s the reality that Embiid has not been himself at the offensive end in the three games he has played in the series. The reasons are understandable. He is trying to play with a malfunctioning right thumb and also behind a face shield that clearly has made him uncomfortable since he broke his right orbital bone in Game 6 of the last series in Toronto. And if that’s too much for him to score like an MVPMVP-MVP, then the Sixers will have a rough time winning the next two games.
Regularly adjusting the mask all night, Embiid settled for 17 points Tuesday, the
first time in the series the NBA’s leading scorer has led the Sixers in scoring. That’s not enough. Not at this point in the process.
“It was obvious, some of the things we didn’t do,” Rivers said. “We’ve got to establish Joel at the beginning of the game. I thought we went away from that. And that’s what we have to establish every night and then play from that. And I don’t think we did that.”
In Games 3 and 4, the Sixers frolicked with the kind of balanced scoring that typically wins basketball games. It was what they had to do while Embiid regained his strength after having been prohibited under concussion protocols from doing any hard basketball work for at least five days. But they are not set up to beat good teams over long latepostseason series by waiting for Danny Green to mix in an entertaining shooting night. They are set up for Embiid to be the 30.6 ppg. scorer he was in the regular season.
Harden implied that the Heat was allowed to be more physical than the Sixers Tuesday. Rivers, though, knew it was not
that simple.
“We’ve got to own our space,” he said. “I thought they owned our space the entire night.”
Already sore, Embiid held his back after diving into the stands for a loose ball, crashed to the floor in obvious pain after Dewayne Dedmon accidentally smashed a ball into his face, seemed to injure his thumb and was pulled from the game for the final 10 minutes before damaging something else. He tries. Give him that. But even when he has not been as fractured over the years, Embiid has often mixed in an atrocious element. Some years, it’s late turnovers. This year, it’s dramatically diminished scoring.
“He’s got the hand, and his face, and it has been a tough stretch for him,” Rivers said. “But he’s tough. He’s a warrior.”
He’s not the MVP. But it is time for him to show he has the toughness it takes to be something more valuable.