TNT Does Not Know What's Best For Joel Embiid

Charles and Shaq were great players, but wrong about Joel.

[photo: @Sixers]

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing 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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This is what happens when you have the good fortune of playing twice in a row on TNT, I suppose: An entire arc of media stimulus and response involving three former players with very particular standards and one star player not quite playing up to expectations, unfolding over the course of two games in three nights.

The narrative, as you no doubt heard ad nauseum if you were listening to the two broadcasts, was simple: On Tuesday night, Joel Embiid had an underwhelming performance against the Denver Nuggets, and was roundly criticized for it (and for his numbers on the season) in the post-game commentary from Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smtih and Charles Barkley. Embiid respectfully acknowledged the criticism pre-game yesterday afternoon, then went out and put foot to Beantown ass last night, having unquestionably his best performance of the season in a tight win against the hated Celtics. The TNT folks (including Chris Webebr on the call) tore multiple hand ligaments spending all night patting themselves on the setting one of the league’s wayward talents back on track.

Of course, it wasn’t actually that simple, and Sixer fans were rightly incredulous at both the criticism levied by the Inside the NBA analysts on Tuesday, and the way it was later regurgitated as tough-love truth-telling on Thursday. It did seem to have an effect on Embiid in the Boston game, and undoubtedly it was a positive one for the night, but while the message got through to JoJo, you have to wonder if the larger lesson was one that might ultimately do more harm than good.

It’s important to start by saying what most folks reading are no doubt already acutely aware of, which is that the Inside the NBA hosts are not actually NBA experts. Not to say they have nothing of value to offer, as entertainers, as former greats of the game or even as analysts. But to be an NBA expert, you have to both understand how the NBA game is currently played, and know the strengths, weaknesses, styles and strategies of those who play it. And these three guys do not.

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How do we know that? Well, you can go back and search through a whole lot of historical precedent of Barkley claiming jump-shooting teams can’t win championships, and Shaq espousing the unbroken chain of big-man league dominance, among other anachronistic misfires -- or you can just read what their actual criticisms of Joel Embiid’s 22-10-6 performance from Tuesday night.

Shaq: “We’re not criticizing - we’re telling you. You could be great, [but] you ain’t playing hard enough. 22 ain’t enough to get you to the next level. You want to be great, or you want to be good? If you want to be good, keep getting 22 points. You want to be great, get me 28 points, get me 30.”

Barkley: “When I’m playing against Karl Malone, Kevin McHale, Larry Bird -- guys who are great power forwards — my antenna is up. I want to let them know, no, I’m the best power forward, I’m the best power forward… and tonight, you saw these two centers, who are both elite, and neither one of them were like, ‘No, I want you to know that I’m the best center.’”

To summarize, the problem with Joel Embiid as the TNT broadcast crew saw it is twofold: He’s not trying hard enough to score in high volume, and he’s not taking it personally enough when he’s playing against his biggest foes.

To anyone who’s watched the Sixers at length this season, isolating these points as the primary issues with Joel Embiid’s performance -- including in the game against Denver -- seems grimly absurd. Going into last night, Embiid’s scoring was down for the season, and his usage rate, field goals attempted and trips to the line were all a tick lower as well. But his turnovers were also up while his assists are down, and his field goal percentage was at a career low -- all signs of a player whose efficiency would suggest he’s not picking his spots as well as he should be, a conclusion that certainly passes the eye test. To suggest that focusing on upping his scoring volume and trying harder to force the issue would fix the primary issue there is obviously misguided.

And to posit that Joel needs to develop more of a killer instinct when he’s playing his biggest rivals ignores basically everything we know about Joel’s blind spots as a basketball player. Undoubtedly he takes his matchup against Marc Gasol pretty personally at this point, but as we saw in their first showdown this year, that’s not always a good thing with JoJo -- when he focuses on kill kill kill, he gets tunnel vision in the half-court, which means he forces bad shots and drives his way into turnovers trying to do too much, and occasionally posts a big fat bagel in the scoring column (which, turns out, is 22 less than 22). One of the primary reasons the team fared so much better against Toronto in their rematch last Sunday was because Jo essentially took a back seat, shooting just seven times and handing out six assists as Tobias Harris and Ben Simmons carried the load offensively.

The same is true against many of Embiid’s mightiest opponents, particularly the physically brawny ones that he can’t push around in the post -- like Jokic as well, who Embiid had more success jump-shooting over than trying to drive through or around. When he tried to go hard in the post against Jokic late in that Nuggets game, the team stalled and Denver nearly got back in it. We also saw what happened in countless Embiid showdowns against Al Horford when the latter was still on the Celtics, and we still see it occasionally when he faces against Rudy Gobert on Utah -- centers that Joel can’t physically dominate still tend to give him issues. And while that’s certainly something for him to work on and hopefully improve upon for the remainder of his NBA prime, the catch-all answer for him is not Find the Meanest Center on the Yard and Yam It In His Face.

It’s the same thing Mike and Spike talk about all the time on the pod with people who complain about shooters needing to be MORE CONSISTENT: What they really mean, of course, is HIT SHOTS MORE OFTEN -- which hey, sure, everyone should, but not always as easily said as done. For the TNT guys (and for their big-man targets specifically), their version of this is needing to be MORE AGGRESSIVE -- if a player isn’t performing at the proper statistical level, then clearly they just need to be pumping a little more Zack de la Rocha into their pre-game regimen. But of course, they’re not really taking issue with the level of aggro on display, really they’re just saying SCORE MORE -- which, again, nice advice if you can follow it, but basically on the Mr. Burns level of management and motivation.

And honestly, it’s not like Joel Embiid has been beyond reproach this season. This isn’t an example of Sixers fans protecting JoJo like the baby bird he is to us -- well, not entirely, anyway -- since most realistic fans have found plenty of things to reasonably take him to task for this season, even as his productivity remains generally at a very high level. If the TNT guys had called him out for spinning into double teams in the post, or pump-faking too much behind the arc, or going for out-of-position blocks when he should be boxing out for rebounds, or taking too long to give up the ball in transition, or any number of other smaller complaints we’ve had with Jo’s game this season -- there’d be nothing we could really say to the contrary.

Hell, if they even wanted to make it about Embiid’s focus, or conditioning, or overall emotional maturity… I wouldn’t necessarily feel all that comfortable making those judgments myself, but fine, there’s an argument. And those kind of personality-based, non-box-score things are things that guys with experience playing the game might in theory have a better read on -- better than us layfolk who haven’t played with pros at the highest level and can’t suss out fairly quickly who is and who isn’t bringing it at 100%, or who’s skipping practices, or zoning out during locker room speeches, or pissing off the rookies by mocking them for not knowing who Van Halen is. I don’t know, and you don’t know, but -- again, theoretically -- these guys might.

But that’s not what Shaq and Chuck faulted Embiid for. They’re not saying get in the weight room, they’re not saying get to practice on time, they’re not saying get the number of a good therapist. They’re not really offering much specific advice at all, except get bigger numbers. Even before the game last night, Ernie Johnson asked the three for their prediction of how many points Embiid would get in the game, as if that number would be the only barometer needed to measure how effective a game he had. Not like anyone expects a TNT pre-game show to delve into Basketball-Reference Game Score formula calculations or anything, but for an entire major broadcast team to just go straight-up POINTZ in 2019 does feel pretty sobering.

And yet: Even with all of this criticism being obviously pigheaded and boring and besides the point, I do have to admit that Joel Embiid responded to it beautifully. As satisfying as it would’ve been to have JoJo respond to it by threatening to kick Barkley’s bald head into a block of Castle reruns, for him to really absorb the criticism, admit that there are areas of his game that have been lacking -- though at least he mentioned his own efficiency as a big part of that -- and vow to get better, is pretty heartening. Especially when it leads to a performance like last night’s, in which he excelled not by forcing the issue just to force the issue, but by simply being the best player on the court, which he undoubtedly was. It was kind of cool, really.

It was also strangely moving watching Barkley react to the Embiid pre-game interview from yesterday, and then to see him talk to JoJo after the game. The mutual respect there was legitimate, and both Chuck and Joel seemed legitimately touched that the other one had given such consideration to them and their opinions. When Barkley said his criticisms of Embiid weren’t personal and that he just wanted the center to be the best possible version of himself… well, there’s always some ego involved from the older players in these things, but I mostly believed him. And Embiid didn’t just seem like a kid in detention, ready to tell the teacher what they wanted to hear so he could skedaddle -- he really seemed invested in receiving the knowledge that these one-time greats had to offer him, and he felt validated to have re-earned their approval and gold star with his performance last night.

Tempting, then, to maybe just say all’s well that ends well with this stuff, and let the TNT folks spread fake narratives and bad advice if the final result is just our best guy playing better? Maybe, but maybe not: Let’s not forget that this was not Nikola Jokic that Joel Embiid was playing against last night, nor Rudy Gobert or Marc Gasol. This was Daniel Theis and Enes Kanter, two guys who can do some things to bother Joel -- particularly on the offensive end -- but are basically two very tall pieces of green Jell-O when it comes to stopping him in the post. He played them particularly well, and he did a very good job reading and neutralizing Boston’s inevitable double teams, but this was not exactly a marquee matchup for JoJo.

So what happens then, if next time we’re playing the Raptors and he’s squaring up against Marc Gasol, he hears those Hall of Famer voices in his head yelling BARBECUE CHICKEN? Will he think that he has to force the issue and get to 28 points at all costs, even when Gasol’s lone remaining elite basketball skill is turning that over-eagerness against him and goading him into any number of bad passes, worse shots and truly unforgivable turnovers? Or will he do what he did in the game on Sunday, and recognize that 10 is a totally acceptable number of points to score as long as your team is winning by twice that much? We can only hope that Jo comes to understand that this criticism may make for good TV drama, but at the end of the day, that’s all that TNT really knows.