This Trade Deadline Doesn't Matter. Only Joel Embiid Matters.

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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It was a breathtaking moment listening to Tuesday's Lowe Post podcast, recorded after Joel Embiid's stupefying 70-point performance against the Spurs on Monday night. Early in the pod, Zach Lowe referred to Embiid as having "one of the greatest seasons of all time." I waited for the qualifier: "for the 76ers," "for a big man," "as a scorer," something to hedge the statement a little. But no, Lowe was willing to just throw it out there. And for good reason: Joel Embiid is having one of the greatest seasons in NBA history. He's doing historic things on a nightly basis, he's owning both sides of the ball, and he's winning a whole lot. It's by far the best season of his career, by far the best season anyone is having this year, and by far the best a 76er has played in most of our regular-season-ball-watching lifetimes. Listening to that Lowe Post, I realized all this sort of at once. And I thought the following, with all the love in my heart: Uh-oh.  

The trade deadline is coming up in almost exactly two weeks. NBA’s Silly Season has been kicking into high gear accordingly and the Sixers will undoubtedly find themselves at the center of it sooner or later. Hell, Spike and Mike have been Starhunting on the pod for so long it's felt like the deadline has been imminent since late November -- and they've talked about the same potentially difference-making guys so many times it’s almost like all we have to do is decide on which one or two or three of them we want to tip into our cart over the next 15 days. The Sixers' shopping list is considerable: a supplementary scorer and secondary playmaker, a three-and-D guy to flesh out our rotation, a reliable backup big with real size and rebounding to him. We could use all of it, and no two Process Trusters will feel the exact same way about either which list items are the top priorities or who the market's best options are to satisfy them. 

Well, the good news is that I can simplify this for all of us a little: None of it actually matters. It's all a distraction. This trade deadline will not make or break the Sixers as true championship contenders in the playoffs. Only Joel Embiid can do that. 

An oversimplification? Sure. I mean, if you say so. Undoubtedly I'd feel a little more comfortable going into the battles that await on our hero's journey against old foes like Jimmy Butler, Al Horford and Doc Rivers (looooool??!?!?!?) with a properly fortified lineup. I'd love to get DeMar DeRozan and Alex Caruso from the Bulls. I'd be pumped to land Cam Johnson from the Nets or Klay Thompson from the Warriors. I'd talked myself into Pascal Siakam being a near-ideal third guy for us, our Aaron Gordon for this upcoming run. All that stuff could (and hopefully will) help. 

But ultimately, the trade deadline is just the vegetable sides for this upcoming Sixers run. Joel Embiid is the steak. How good he is going to determine how good the whole thing is. 

I think sometimes we get so bored with the narratives about Joel Embiid's lackluster playoff performance that we forget just how absurdly wide the chasm is between his postseason and regular season play. But let's consider his Game 5 against the Celtics last year: That was when he scored 33 against the C's in Boston, put up four blocks, generally controlled the tempo throughout the game and helped the Sixers secure a 3-2 series advantage. It was pretty easily his signature performance of the postseason, a game after which many local and national pundits deemed him to have turned a corner as a playoff player. 

You know what his Basketball-Reference Game Score was for that game? 23.5. You know where that would rank among the 32 games he's played so far this 2023-24 regular season? Between 26th and 27th -- and lower than all but one game (the Knicks blowout) he's had since this 30-point streak started in mid-November. The best Joel Embiid played in the playoffs last year was still significantly worse, at least production-wise, than even an average regular season game for him this year. 

And last year was of course the rule, not the exception: The same was more or less true in the Heat series in 2022, the turned-to-shit second half of the Hawks series in 2021, the Raptors series in 2019 -- yeesh, look at some of those stat lines -- and the Celtics series in 2018. The only time his production was relatively consistent was against the C's in 2020, and even then it wasn't at an exceptionally high level, and the rest of the team was so lackluster it might not have mattered anyway. 

I don't say all of this to dump on Joel: He certainly deserves some criticism for his reliably sub-standard playoff showings, even with all the mitigating circumstances and the health-related excuses we can rattle off like Green Day lyrics by this point, but that's not why I bring all this up. I'm just trying to illustrate that it's not just that Embiid hasn't always played up to his potential in the postseason, it's that he's consistently played like an altogether different and dramatically worse player. That player is still very good compared to the rest of the league -- if Bam Adebayo had his postseason numbers, I doubt they would really make anyone flinch; if Deandre Ayton had them, they'd be a major breakthrough. But you're not winning a title with Bam Adebayo or Deandre Ayton as your best player. 

You can absolutely win a title with 2023-24 regular season Joel Embiid as your best player. You can probably win a title with a version of Embiid who's only about 80% as productive; even that guy would undoubtedly still be one of the three or four baddest dudes in the playoffs. If Joel is even close to as dominant in the playoffs as he has been this regular season -- which, again, he has never been for all or even most of a second round -- the Sixers will be as scary a team as any. I'd take them over anyone we'd face in the first round (though would love for Miami to not test us on that). I'd take them over the Bucks. I'd take them over anyone we've played so far in the West. I'd at least take my chances with them against the Celtics. And if he isn't? See you in September. 

The rest of the team... I don't want to say they don't matter, because obviously that's not true. But I trust them well enough to basically be who they are, and I think who they are is generally good enough. Tyrese Maxey will have up and down games based on his shooting and finishing, but I don't worry about him going Full Harden and essentially pulling the plug on himself in the first quarter when he just doesn't have it. Tobias Harris will have games where his missed loose balls and clanked corner threes make us scream bloody murder, but on average he'll do what he does as a secondary scorer, have a strong half here and there, and more or less play his part. De'Anthony Melton, Nicolas Batum, Paul Reed, Patrick Beverley, Kelly Oubre... they'll come and go as role players do, but I don't worry about any of them being straight-up unplayable. That's all you really ask of your supporting cast: to show up and support. 

And you know what? The Sixers are really fucking good this season. Like, better than we even realize, I think. The fact that they're 29-13 and on a 56-win pace with a +8.3 scoring differenetial maybe even undersells how good they are a little, because of how banged up they've been and how vulnerable they are when shorthanded. They're 3-7 when Joel Embiid sits, but 26-6 when he plays -- a 66-win pace -- and their starting five has not just been the best in the league, it's No. 1 by a truly insane margin. Maxey-Melton-Harris-Batum-Embiid are a dumbfounding +34 per 100 possessions in the 219 minutes they've played together; no other five-man lineup who's played 200 minutes has a differential even half that high. Some of that is likely inflated by the junky December run they went on against the dregs of the league, but this is a really strong team that's only getting stronger, particularly as Embiid continues his climb towards NBA valhalla. With the Bucks changing coaches and about to hit the hard part of their schedule, the Sixers feel almost certain to end up with the two seed if they stay healthy-ish. 

Does that mean they can beat the one team bound to finish ahead of them: the Celtics (natch)? Maybe, maybe not. But another important thing about the Sixers' postseason fortunes that we probably don't consider enough: As below-par as Joel Embiid has been basically every second round for us, we've still been really, tantalizingly, annoyingly close in four of the last five years. Toronto's win came down to a single insane shot. Atlanta needed two of the worst single-game collapses in our franchise's history to even have a chance. Miami got a head start of two games without Joel and the most banged-up version of him for the rest of the series, and still needed six games to finish us. Boston could've gone down in six themselves last year if DeAnthony Melton had hit a couple open fourth-quarter threes. That's not to say we deserved to win any of those series with Joel playing as he did -- it's just to say that one or two of them probably would've been cakewalks if he'd been at anywhere near his most productive. The rest of the team's been good enough. We haven't really been that far away (when healthy) since 2018. 

I think if the NBA has shown us one thing in the past three years -- maybe five if you wanna go back to Kawhi in 2019 -- it's that winning an NBA championship right now is more (like, A LOT a lot more) about your best player playing like the best player in the world than it is about anything else. The Nuggets, Warriors and Bucks didn't win titles because their role players really stepped up, or because their second- and third-best guys went absolutely bonkers. In many cases, their role players proved erratic, and their other stars were guys who made you go "Was Andrew Wiggins really the third-best player in that Golden State title run?" They won titles because Nikola Jokic, Steph Curry and Giannis Antetokounmpo all saw the light at the exact right time and tore through the league like the all-time greats they are, and because the rest of their teams were generally solid enough to fill in the blanks around them. Joel Embiid is at that all-time level now; he just has to play like it in the playoffs. If he does, we may end up even farther ahead of the pack than we ever imagined. 

That doesn't mean that I'm advocating for Daryl Morey to put his hands firmly underneath his ass for the next two weeks: If there are fair deals at a good price to be made to improve the team in the next two weeks, by all means he should make them. If nothing else, adding to the talent and depth on this team will provide insurance, so we don't need to be overly reliant on guys like Oubre or Beverley if things go south with one of them, and we don't fall into total catastrophe just because Batum or Reed has to miss some or all of a series. I don't believe anyone we get at the deadline is going to have a major effect on our playoff chances, but sometimes the margins in these games are small. If both Joel and Giannis are playing like gods at the same time in the second round and a pivotal game comes down to what our guys can do in the four Q4 minutes when Jo is off the floor, I'd of course want that unit to be as sturdy as we can possibly make it. 

But again, it's fingerling potatoes next to the porterhouse issue of whether Joel Embiid can play like Joel Embiid. Yes, maybe the Sixers could've just squeaked by the Celtics last year on a couple James Harden miracle performances and some better role-player shooting in Game Six, but the real reason they lost that series is because Boston's best player came alive from late Game Six through all Game Seven while ours turned away from the sun and went back to bed. If you're serious about winning a title, the gameplan can't be to handicap your franchise star as much as possible and just hope he doesn't collapse too destructively. Joel needs help getting over the top, but he still has to do most of the climbing himself. 

This year, no matter what happens at the trade deadline, he should be in position to do that -- probably the best position of his career. And that's what's both exciting and absolutely petrifying about this impending postseason. It goes back to that part of the Stephen A. Smith rant from five seasons ago that I still obsess over: There's no excuse now. If Embiid finally delivers in these playoffs and gets the Sixers farther than he ever has before, it will be the ultimate validation for a season that would truly be on the shortlist for the greatest from any player in league history. If for the seven straight postseason, Embiid gets hurt, massively underwhelms or both, it'll be his and our greatest heartbreak (and longest subsequent offseason) yet, and will forever discolor the magic of this all-time regular season run. Whatever the fate of this Sixers season, it rests solely in the hands and lower body of our likely-soon-to-be-two-time MVP. And not a single thing that could happen this trade deadline is gonna change that.