December 12, 2022
If Joel Embiid has a defining trait, there's a case to be made it is defiance. In a league filled with stars who threw themselves into basketball and basketball only for most of their lives, it is a former soccer and volleyball player often shining brightest. Instead of giving canned answers and following the path of many of the league's best, he says what he thinks, whether the results are funny, enraging, or misinterpreted by people who don't have the time to listen to a full quote.
And then there's his game, never quite what a lot of people want from him. He is a big man in a league tilting more toward little men, a jump shooter for a fanbase that has so often demanded more paint touches. And in a 53-point classic against Charlotte, he did what few big men are able to do, which is to say, absolutely everything.
"He literally scored in every way you can possibly score a basketball tonight," Doc Rivers said on Sunday. "Even the last play was a slot drive, and we do that drill every day but we do it for the guards. I don't think we've ever done it for bigs. Maybe we need to add that now because that was terrific."
When you see a big man put up a game where he makes 20 out of 32 shots, you expect that you're going to see a montage of dunks and layups. And to Rivers' point, the performance lacked for nothing. The Hornets tried to put up barriers and stop signs, throwing bodies and switches and extra help in the big man's way, and he rendered whatever effort they offered moot.
This is the sort of play we're used to seeing from Tyrese Maxey, the young guard bursting through space even before the pass gets there. To see Embiid take a pass on the wing and hit a slot drive like that is something different, a moment even his teammates have to chew on for a moment.
"He's six-foot-eleven and can move like a guard," James Harden said Sunday. "It's pretty special to see. He gets to the basket and draws so much attention, it's just crazy. It's crazy to be that big and being able to move like that."
The bind he has put teams in — are you more worried about cutting off his paths to the rim, or the big man splashing a jumper in your face? More resources have been spent on the former, understandably so for a guy who can reach up and dunk on his tip toes if he has the space. But if you worry too much about stopping the rim, you are conceding borderline automatic shots from the midrange.
It's part of why Embiid and Harden have been such a devastating combination in pick-and-rolls even though Harden hasn't found his scoring boots quite yet. The threat of Embiid scoring at the rim warrants dropping your big further back in an effort to corral Harden and wall off Embiid at the same time. Do that, and your options are a late closeout from the big, help from a much smaller player, or a breakdown in the assignment that gives him a clear look at the basket. In most games, you get all three of those, Embiid feasting regardless. Lean on your defender, relocate quickly, bang:
By and large, we are living through an era of midrange death. Harden and Daryl Morey's Rockets even championed the loss of that shot to an extreme level, nearly ignoring shots from that area of the floor as they helped lead a revolution toward three-point jumpers and layups. But that transition has always rested on a premise that players can't maintain the efficiency there to justify relying on that shot as a regular source of offense.
Embiid is challenging that notion. Through his first 18 games played, Embiid is 42/79 on shots from 15 feet to the three-point line, a staggering 53.2 percent according to the NBA's tracking data. It's a number that's hard to wrap your mind around because there's only one guy in his height range who has ever lived in a similar space: Dirk Nowitzki. And in recent years, we have seen Embiid borrow small pieces of the German great's game, most notably the one-legged fadeaway that helped power his 2020-21 MVP push.
His numbers on the midrange tailed off last season — still good, but backing away from historic — and now he finds himself back where he was during the most efficient season of his career. For now, he's still trying to find a way to pinpoint why that is. As he searches for an explanation, he dwells on what he can do better.
"It goes back to the mechanics," Embiid said Sunday. "The way I see my shot, usually, when I miss a shot, I kind of think about the physics. Did I hold my follow-through? Did I leave it too short? How did the ball come off my hand? All that stuff. So I try to make those types of adjustments. I think that's my shot, that's a shot I can get to every time. I know everybody wants me to be in the paint, but most of the time the paint is crowded anyway. That's why we needed to add something different to my game."
"I expect to make that shot every single time. When I miss it, it's very disappointing. I don't understand why I missed it. It's hard to be 100 percent, especially when you got a bunch of guys contesting the shot everywhere. But that's a shot I feel like I can get any time, and I put in a lot of work. I'm going to continue to put in a lot of work to make sure it's just automatic."
If his success there dwindles, Embiid certainly has other things to fall back on. He has finished 70.7 percent of his shots in the restricted area, and he continues to draw fouls at an elite rate while converting them at an efficiency (85 percent) that would make most guards and wings jealous. He's not wholly reliant on any one thing, and the Sixers have started to distance themselves from post-ups, relying instead on elbow touches, where he believes he has more options and a better chance to attack double teams.
He has given reasons to doubt that belief at times, including in a turnover-plagued loss in Houston last week, but the shifts have undoubtedly made him as good as he has ever been on offense. After becoming the first center to average 30 points per game since Moses Malone in the early 1980s, Embiid is sitting on 33.4 points per game on 53.5 percent from the field with the league past the quarter point of the season. The list of men who have averaged 33 a night on 50 percent shooting or better is a short one: Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, George Gervin, and Bob McAdoo.
But the goal is higher than historical factoids or becoming the first player to score multiple 50-point games this season. Last Friday, he told reporters he is confident in the spirit and togetherness of his team in spite of their up-and-down start, and that all eyes remain on their goals in the distance rather than bumps in the road. Observing from the outside, that can feel hard to believe, and then you walk into a Montrezl Harrell-led singalong following a December win against the Hornets and start to think Embiid might know better.
Take Embiid at his word, and he tells you these performances are what happens when you remain focused on something bigger than yourself. Do what you're supposed to. The results will come.
"It would suck to have those types of scoring nights if you lose, I'm just happy that it's contributing to winning," Embiid said. "At the end of the day, what matters is whatever brings us the win."
"I just got to keep trying to be efficient, and play with my teammates, and good things happen when you worry about the right things. That's moving the ball, and the ball just finds me."
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