How big an impact can one player make if they’re not able to play legitimate, full court 5-on-5 basketball? A pretty sizable one, at least if your name is Joel Embiid.
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“Joel looked good,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said on Monday, putting a little bit of extra emphasis at the end of his assessment. The team is still on the cautious route with their young center for the time being, but you can still sense the jubilation from his coach anytime they get extended action out of him.
“His physical presence and how competitive he is, that’s a powerful combination. You put somebody that competitive and that big on the court, he’s different. He changed practice today,” said Brown. “We’re usually very competitive, but the physical side, there’s just less space. He’s 7’2” and every bit of it, and the spacing really stands out as much as anything.”
That jubilation goes double for the fans, who only need to hear Embiid’s unofficial theme song — “Wicked” by Future, for those keeping track—to know he’s about to come through.
Still, we have reached the point in the preseason where fans are starting to get a little nervous about his status, and it’s hard to blame them. Embiid has yet to participate in any full court 5-on-5, and per an update from the Sixers on Tuesday, Embiid will not play in either of the team’s two home games during the preseason (Wednesday vs. Memphis, Friday vs. Boston). The Sixers can stress their preference for a conservative timeline as often as they’d like, the fact remains that we are six-plus months removed from the surgery Embiid underwent to repair a torn meniscus. That’s typically more than enough time to get everything in order.
The only bit of relief has been Embiid’s constant presence during team activities. In years past, he spent a lot of his time being whisked off to specialists, mostly hidden from view until he was good and ready to be seen by the public. That’s not been the case this preseason, with the giant center always looming in the background when his teammates are in the middle of scrimmages and full-court drills.
You can add, “running through the streets of Center City” to the Embiid sighting list. On Monday evening, a video emerged of Joel Embiid running through the streets of Philadelphia, which Brown later claimed was actually filmed after Embiid had participated in a tennis match against one of the team’s assistant coaches.
If you can repress the urge to compare his tennis match to one of Andrew Bynum’s bowling sessions, the message seems clear: the Sixers can’t be that concerned about Embiid’s health. And if knowing an assistant coach was happy to play tennis with him isn’t enough, Brown insists he’s already getting more out of Embiid than he expected up until this point. He flashed the team’s practice plan at reporters on Tuesday and indicated the green section we could see on the sheet — roughly 75 percent of the page — marked everything Joel Embiid was involved with.
I know what you’re thinking: we’re 15 days from the opener, and all we have is a bunch of a talk, a piece of paper, and an unseen tennis match. Not exactly encouraging. If you’re looking for a silver lining, though, the media got our first sighting of Embiid actively participating in a team activity, working with his teammates on end-of-game inbounds plays. It wasn’t much, but it was something ... and a nice change from the usual display of him doing individual drills on the second court.
You don’t have to be a basketball savant to see the benefits of having Embiid around. Brown claims he can feel the entire tenor of a practice session change when Embiid is on the court, even if it’s simply because he’s simply the largest man in the room. And there’s no doubt creeping in among Embiid’s teammates, who are sure as they’ve ever been about Embiid’s ability to take them to the promised land.
Robert Covington, now an elder statesman among this group of Sixers, was firm on how good he thinks the team can be if Embiid is able to stay healthy.
“Plain and simple, very [good],” said Covington. “His presence alone, he commands a lot of double teams, and he’s a great passer out of the post as well. He’s very versatile, he can play off the dribble, his way of playing with our style of play is going to affect us in many ways. He can do so much on the defensive end that his presence alone will be an X-factor for us.”
It’s not the most reassuring thing in the world to hear the team’s best player referred to as an “X-factor,” but Sixers fans should have long since learned to cope with the unknown when it comes to Joel Embiid. Regardless, everyone will be hoping the team’s sense of optimism is not misplaced.