Embiid’s determination to play ‘priceless’ to Sixers
PHILADELPHIA >> It’s a threeword phrase that best will define Joel Embiid. And no, it’s not “Trust the Process.”
It’s more vulgar than that, and it’s more real.
It’s what he said, on the record and into microphones, with cameras humming and people wondering, early last season. It was his reaction to being told his minutes would be restricted and that he would play only in certain situations. It was his public response to a Sixers organization that had become obsessed with limiting his pro basketball opportunities. The clean version of Embiid’s response: That’s utter nonsense.
Brett Brown heard that last year, and soon after, the Sixers responded, quietly lifting Embiid’s minute-restriction and allowing him to play almost every night. It’s why they’d given him a max contract. It’s why he could become an All-Star. And his outward rejection of being told by others that he was too sore or too weak or too brittle to play hard every minute and every night in the NBA was a catapult to the Sixers winning 52 games.
He wants to play. Brown wasn’t necessarily thinking about Embiid’s one-man job-action Saturday, when his center walked onto the court to warm up for a game against the Charlotte Hornets just a day after rolling his ankle in practice. But somewhere inside the Sixers’ coach could recall so many others, no names necessary, who would have taken a painful ankle injury as a reason to rest. Sports culture, particularly in the pros, allows for athletes to wait days or weeks or months to recover from sore hamstrings and weak backs and assorted bruises to body and ego. Not Embiid.
Not him.
“It’s priceless,” Brown said. “This is what we’re all sort of seeing. Bruce Bowen played (500) games in a row. Andre Miller had a string going on. Those days are gone. They’re done. Whether it’s sports science, whether it’s contracts, whether it’s agents, whether it’s clubs, it’s different. Nowadays clubs initiate it. They say, ‘You’re not playing back to back.’ It’s changed, for all of those reasons. But with Joel, if you have the baseline that the guy always does want to play, then whether it’s an agent or a club or a record or sports science, and there are always little fistfights that go on underneath that, that helps.”
Given everything it had taken to advance Embiid to the point where he can put up MVP-level stats and back them up with MVPlevel durability, it’s ironic that his reputation is one of a determined worker. Since he was legitimately injured late in his only college season at Kansas, then again through his first two seasons in the NBA, he was accurately tagged with the reputation of an injury risk. The Sixers have been up front about that, acknowledging it was why Embiid was able to slide to them at No. 3 overall in the 2014 draft.
Nor was Embiid in a position to fight the sportsscience department early in his pro career, including Year 3, when he was on a severe workload limit yet eventually wound up sustaining a season-ending knee injury. But once he signed a $148,000,000 contract last season, the weight of authority had shifted. In that league, it’s the moneyed players who make the decisions, not the agents or the scientists or that guy on the bench with a whiteboard in one hand and a marking pen in the other. And that’s when Embiid’s real value was revealed.
He may be sore. But he will never let that be a reason to initiate a sick call.
“He really sees himself as a man of the people,” Brown said. “He loves being in the game with the city, with the people. He feels like he lets them down if he doesn’t. You take that responsibility and the notion that he is highly competitive anyway, and it’s the perfect storm to find that he’s somebody that you really want to coach.
“And the fact that he happens to be our crown jewel makes it even a better story.”
Embiid was injured in practice Friday. As usual, the Sixers were vague about the severity, but they did list him as “questionable” until about 10 minutes before the game Saturday. But Embiid warmed up and declared himself fit. That was no surprise. He plays. And he enjoys every second.
There even have been some leaked mumbles that Embiid plays so hard in practice, and with such a lack of abandon, that teammates are careful not to get in his way and risk some random collision. It’s why Embiid’s regular season ended last year, when at seven feet tall, his eye bone somehow was cracked when it accidentally crashed into 6-4 Markelle Fultz during a game.
Joel Embiid doesn’t know when to stop playing hard. So that’s what he did Saturday, with the Sixers stuck in a two-game losing streak and thirsty for a victory. If he was hindered, and there was at least an early hint at some disturbance in his pace, he did not allow it to stop him from scoring 15 points in the first half alone.
His attitude, and the signal it sent that the losing streak had to stop, had multiple ripples.
“It’s huge,” Ben Simmons said. “It’s what you want everybody to have. This is the NBA. Jeremy Lin said it the other day: Not many people play in this league. And to be in this league, it’s an honor. So everybody should play the same way.”
That would be, as it is for the 76ers, priceless.