Embiid fades during crunch time in Game 1
76ers star player fades during crunch time
All the injuries were behind. All the load-management time was logged. All the back-to-back game concessions were made. All the teaching was over.
The preparation was done. The growth period was history. The young-player tolerance was spent. The All-Star respect was in place. All that was left, after all those years, after all those hedges and other un-natural basketball decisions, was for Brett Brown to let it rip.
“I’m going to play Joel,” the Sixers coach was saying Monday evening, before a 109-101 loss to the Boston Celtics in Game 1 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals, “more than I would in a regular-season game.”
Brown was hardly the first coach in sports history to slam into the conclusion that, in a win-or-perish portion of a season, it’s reasonable to trust the best player. It’s just that for as long as Joel Embiid has been a Sixer, there was always a reason to be careful.
There were brittle bones. There were brittle on-court relationships. There were over-important sports scientists. There was a process.
But there the Sixers were Monday, bubbled-up in a madefor-basketball world and in
more ways than one with no way to escape. Their other All-Star, Ben Simmons, was missing, sent somewhere to have his left kneecap surgically realigned. And after all those injuries, including a pair of fresh ones in the last two weeks, Embiid was where he should be at this point in his career.
So Brown, with nothing to lose but his job, finally lifted all restrictions, pretense and analytical basketball absurdity.
It would be time for Embiid, with no asterisks.
“There is zero doubt mentally he’s as good as he’s been,” Brown announced. “He’s in a great place. He understands, especially without Ben, the responsibility and the opportunity that he has. I think his head and his mind are in a very good place.”
His head and mind were never in question. It was his back, eye socket, knee, other knee, foot, hand and shoulder that were the issues. Yet through an exasperating, six-year vigil, the Sixers hoped they would come to a point that they did Monday night in Orlando, with Embiid healthy, rested and determined. For a while, it worked. And then, after all that managed load, in a game the Sixers had a chance to win, Embiid played with diminished energy in the fourth quarter. He was late for rebounds. He was slow to tip in a missed Alec Burks free throw. He didn’t fight for offensive positioning underneath. He shot 1-for-5 and was a minus-six in the final 12 minutes as the Sixers were outscored, 34-22.
The game was playoffrough. The Celtics, like every team in the NBA, doubled, tripled and surrounded Embiid at every opportunity. They muscled him into foul trouble. They made him work. And when Embiid showed some exhaustion, their season grew a little late, too.
“You can’t minimize the fact that losing stinks,” Brown said. “But I feel like there are answers to the questions of why.”
That’s the nature of the best-of-seven. Read, react, adjust. The Sixers are not yet at a critical point. But if Brown’s plan in the absence of Simmons is to trust Embiid to dominate for close to 40 minutes, and if that doesn’t work, then where does he turn?
Tobias Harris only scored 15 Monday. Al Horford was a minus-18 against his former team. Shake Milton shot 5-for-7 and 3-for-5 from the arc, which is about what the Sixers need. But he played like a rookie point guard, tentative at times, making three turnovers, occasionally unable to key the offense. If that form follows, Brown will have to turn the offense over to Burks, whose experience showed.
But Milton and Burks, and even Harris and Horford, are not good enough to fuel a championship team, not the way Kemba Walker, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown can lead a long postseason run.
The Sixers need Embiid for that. And they need it for four quarters.
“Especially with the way I played in the first quarter, I needed to be more assertive and demand the ball,” said Embiid, who did score 26 points in 37 minutes. “I have to be more aggressive.”
With no center able to honestly match up against him, Embiid went immediately to work Monday, depositing a soft hook past overmatched Daniel Theis on the first possession. He would shoot 5-for-5 in the first quarter, collect four rebounds, protect the rim, run the floor and dive on it, too. And not once did he need to get up from a collision and limp. As Brown said, “he knows how to fall.”
Without Simmons, the Sixers will be a little out of sorts in the series, particularly at the defensive end. They had no answers Monday for Tatum, who scored 32 points and apparently will haunt them for that Markelle Fultz blunder all the way to his Hall of Fame acceptance speech. Simmons would have helped. Yet it is the very absence of Simmons, whose determination to win the most highlights despite a refusal to shoot from distance, that should unlock the full greatness of Embiid.
It’s his time.
It’s nobody else’s time. “I see his playoff face,” Brown said. “It’s an understanding that, though everybody’s internal clock got bumped a little bit, that it is the playoffs. You get that the playoffs are here. And I see how he sort of moves around a practice facility, the questions that he asks, the engagement he has with his teammates.
“I see an older, more mature leader. And I think he is in a really good place.”
At this point, the Sixers, and their coach, had better hope it is true.