OK Joel, Show Us What You Got
With Simmons hurt, it’s all on the big man.
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Well, that's it. Even after three resoundingly underwhelming games to kick off our Bubble Ball Restart, I was still more than willing to keep beating the Team to Beat in the East drum for these Sixers. Just give them time! Look at how much Shake Milton is already bouncing back from that first game! Wait until Al Horford remembers how tall a regulation basketball hoop is when trying to score from two feet away! But with Ben Simmons sidelined with a subluxation of the left patella -- once you have to start Googling with the Sixers, you know it's already over -- and likely out until season's end, that's officially a wrap on the Sixers' postseason ambitions. Maybe it was always delusional to believe the Sixers had legit title hopes, but now it's downright ignorant.
Thus essentially endeth a season that, despite some top-tier individual memories -- the Furkan shot in Portland, Simmons' triple-double in Brooklyn, that classic tweet about Paul George desperately calling for help in guarding Shake Milton -- few will remember fondly on the whole. The pieces never quite fit, the supporting cast underwhelmed, and the stars failed to take whatever leap was required to drag this team to a new level on their own. Now, even a second-round exit in the playoffs seems a fantasy, and the Sixers team we see take the court the next time afterwards might look very different -- and will almost certainly have a different coach rapidly graying on the sideline.
Time to check out on the season, then? Of course not: If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders doesn't even condone checking out of garbage time during Summer League, let alone still-undecided restart games with playoff implications, or the playoff games themselves. For better or worse, those are still coming, and it's just a bit too late for the Sixers to tank their way out of the sixth seed. There's still basketball to be played, and there's still reasons to watch: the biggest one of course being the seven-foot man in the middle.
For all that's already gone wrong so far this restart season, the most important thing has actually gone swimmingly: Joel Embiid is healthy, motivated, and playing some of the best basketball of his career. You don't really need the numbers, but I'll give 'em to you anyway: Through three Bubble Ball games, he's averaging 32.7 PPG, 13.7 RPG, 4.0 APG, 1.7 STL, 1.7 BLK and 3.7 TOV while shooting 58%/11%/82% and getting to the line 11 times a night. The three-point stroke isn't there at the moment, clearly, but the entire rest of his game is humming right now. He's been effective early, he's been effective late, he's gone against big lineups and small lineups and summarily decimated both.
Best of all, he's been a true offensive hub. The knock on Joel as a first option has always been that he's extremely vulnerable to double-teams: Throw an extra man at Jo in the post, and he either tries to score anyway, forces a pass that isn't there or just dribbles back out to where he has to start the possession all over again. Tom West of Liberty Ballers wrote a post for yesterday illustrating the ways Joel has made defenses pay for doubling him so far this restart, making quick, smart decisions that either lead directly to buckets, or kick the offense into motion with an advantage that ultimately leads in a bucket.
Good thing, too, because now the Sixers' offense is Joel Embiid, pure and simple. Sure, we'll get some Shake-Horf pick-and-roll stabs, and Tobias will still back his defender in for a mid-range turnaround jumper twelve times a game, and maybe Brett can try to pretend Furkan Korkmaz is J.J. Redick with a couple games' worth of offensive sets. But now, in addition to being the Sixers' defensive anchor -- a role that becomes even more crucial with their jack-of-all-positions perimeter defender now sidelined -- he's got to be the thing the offense revolves around in nearly every possession he's on the floor. He's gotta be our Dirk Nowitzki as well as our Dwight Howard.
And maybe he can. That is the potential of Joel Embiid: to be the NBA's most versatile, prolific, and essential two-way player. He can be as deadly as Kawhi Leonard, as indomitable as Giannis Antetokounmpo. Some combination of injuries, waning mojo and generally bad timing has always held Embiid short of achieving that, but now here he is, with just five regular season games, one postseason series, no co-star and no expectations left. The time for Embiid to make the jump from great to Great will never be more silver-plattered: For once, the question for Brett Brown -- beyond how tough it's going to be to fit all the singular crises he saw this team through on his resume once he updates it from 2013 -- isn't "How do we figure out a team that makes sense around our two ill-fitting stars?" From now until the end of the season, it's "How do we make this game as easy as possible for Joel Embiid?"
The question of how to do that is obviously one that will get much discussion over the following weeks. You're not replacing Ben's combination of dribbling, passing and defense with any one Sixer; most of the options will give you one of those at best, though at least they might also throw in some shooting as well. Personally, I think they'll go with Horf in Ben's slot -- he's the team's best passer with Simmons out, and someone's gotta feed Embiid -- but in general, we might get to see four-out lineups around Embiid like we've never really been able with Ben (and even Jimmy Butler) flanking him in the lineup. We don't have the skill guys to replicate SVG-era Magic magic -- yes, Hedo Turkoglu is a bridge too far for these Sixers -- but something resembling the Jason Kidd-era Knicks might be more possible, with Embiid playing both our Carmelo Anthony and our Tyson Chandler.
There's no telling how well it'll work -- though the team's not-entirely-putrid second-half performance against Washington bears some decent indicators at least, and as Rich Hofmann wrote for The Athletic this week, the plus/minus numbers of Embiid and Horford without Simmons have actually been quite good through three games. And there's also no telling how Joel Embiid will respond, mentally or physically, to being a true two-way fulcrum like he's never quite had to be at length for this team before. As great as JoJo has been in his four-season Sixers career, he's never exactly been Chuck Bednarik: Less has usually been more with handling the volume of Embiid’s minutes and touches. Now, 38 minutes a game in the playoffs -- a Brett prediction that MOC rightly dubbed outlandishly optimistic just a week ago -- seems conservative if anything.
But, well, maybe it's time for us to see it. How good can Joel Embiid be with a team that now exists almost solely in his service? Can Embiid not just be the best player in a playoff series, but superior enough to a Jayson Tatum or Jimmy Butler for us to have a chance in a series against an otherwise much deeper, much more balanced, just straight-up much better team? If Jo was one of the five best players in the world -- which, again, we have every reason to think he can be -- then it's at least a possibility.
And that, to me, is certainly reason enough to stay invested. As much as I came to love Ben Simmons this season, Embiid is still the guy the sun rises and sets with, and the story of the Process Sixers is as much about his triumphs and setbacks as it is anything else. Even if the Sixers' championship aspirations are done with -- and I guess it's worth stipulating that there's still a chance Simmons recovers in time to come back for some of them, though it's not large enough for me to think it's really worth doing the necessary calendar math and emotional bargaining -- the possibility if Jo winning a playoff series against a hated rival essentially by his lonesome is just as exhilarating to me.
So let's see it. Starting tonight against the Magic, let's find out what it's like when Joel Embiid actually is the Joel Embiid that Shaq and Charles Barkley drift off to sleep imagining: a guy for whom 40/20 is not just the goal every single night, but the expectation. Let's show these BS East teams built on team culture and mechanical coaching and smart draft maneuvering what it's like when a real superstar enters the building. There's no Jimmy, there's no Ben, and there's no tomorrow. Let's relish watching the Big Man be as great as he can be before Our Bubble Ball Sixers go pop.