This Is Why Joel Embiid Is The MVP
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I really hope it doesn't get lost from Friday night how great Joel Embiid was. His line wasn't his most eye-popping: a par-for-his-course 30 and 13 on OK shooting with four blocks and as many assists as turnovers. But everything you'd want from him in that game, he did: He scored at all three levels (and got to the line a whole bunch), he grabbed tough rebounds and on both sides, he made most of the right reads out of double teams, he protected the paint admirably and didn't get burned much on the perimeter. He played well enough for the Sixers to win the game. For a guy playing a brace, in just his second game back after a bad knee sprain -- and coming off the career-long emotional climax of accepting the MVP trophy for the first time -- it was something of a signature playoff performance.
And it wasn't enough. Not when Harden and Maxey combine to shoot 7-30, not when Horf bombs 5-7 from deep, not when Tobias Harris racks up five fouls in about 20 minutes and follows one of the first loose balls he's ever successfully fought for by passing it right back to Boston. Most of the little things went Boston's way (again), and a handful of the bigger things did, too. But the biggest thing -- having the best player on the court -- is now back in the Sixers' favor. I don't know if that's going to be enough in this series, but it gives us a shot, and it gives us reason to still have hope for the future.
In a sense, Friday night was every meaningful Celtics-Sixers game of the last half-decade (besides the Embiid 52 game, the Jimmy jumper game and the T.J. game): The Sixers fought hard enough to keep things in range throughout, but got beat to every loose ball, gave up every clutch three, and got out-executed just enough down the stretch to make the end result a decisive loss. But in most of those games, Embiid ended up diminished by the end: taken out of his game, making frustration plays, coughing up the ball like he was Doc Holliday in Tombstone. Friday night, he wasn't perfect, but he played well enough on both ends throughout that even with Tatum hitting the biggest shots, I still felt Jo was clearly the best player on the court -- and if the rest of the team was playing at 70% capacity instead of 30%, they probably win the game. That's cold comfort for Game Three, but at least it means that our ceiling is still high enough to win today and get back into this series, assuming the rest of the team gives Jo the help he needs on at least one end of the court.
Mike kinda glanced at this in Friday's Ricky post-game, but something I've thought about a lot in the thick of this year's MVP debate: Out of all the big candidates, Embiid was the lone guy who had to be the best player on both sides of the ball every night. Giannis was arguably the third-most-important defender on the Bucks this year (and could occasionally at game's end leave things to Holiday and Middleton), Jokic was at best a break-even defender and at worst an outright liability, Tatum could hand offensive responsibilities off to Jaylen Brown and defensive assignments to any number of Boston's switchy guards, wings and bigs. Only Embiid was unquestionably his team's best and most important dude on both offense and defense. Only Embiid couldn't get away with phoning it in on either end for any stretch in a big game and still hope for a W. Only Embiid still has to play that way in the playoffs, even at significantly less than 100%.
Someone made the point to me after Game Three on Twitter that Embiid has never had the kind of get-on-my-back, we're-not-losing-this-game playoff performances that we've seen from dudes like Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler and even Devin Booker in these playoffs. It's mostly true, though I might posit Game Three in Toronto last year as an exception to that. Regardless, I think the main difference between Embiid and those guys -- beyond the obvious positional disparity, which makes Embiid the only guy who needs someone to get him the ball (and thus makes it harder for him to just take over a game with his shooting and playmaking) -- is that none of them have anywhere near the defensive responsibilities he does. He's the guy who needs to be contesting Marcus Smart on the perimeter, then recovering to challenge every Brown and Tatum drive, and then scrapping with Al Horford and Rob Williams III for the board. I was flabbergasted that the Celtics kept testing Embiid at the rim in the first half Friday night as he was swatting everything in sight, before it became clear by the second half that they were doing so to cumulatively wear him down -- and in the third quarter, he was a little less effective and a lot more gassed, even though he still held up pretty well throughout.
The point is, you can't really ask him to do all of that and then also demand he be both game-carrying playmaker and finisher on offense. In the last two decades, only LeBron and maybe peak Tim Duncan have won a title being that super-human -- and LeBron had rim protection behind him while Duncan could pick his spots on offense. The hope with this team was that Embiid could also maybe hang back on offense at times in this series; that's why you start a backcourt of James Harden and Tyrese Maxey. There's simply no way Embiid could really ever hope to give half-effort on defense -- the Celtics have too many weapons, and with the Sixers starting a forward tandem of P.J. Tucker and Tobias Harris, they have close to zero rim-protection behind him. He has to do basically everything on defense in this series just for that not side of the ball to end up like a Boston layup line (as it did for most of Game One without him). Which he did, through a sprained knee and sub-prime conditioning and a progressively panicked home crowd.
And even with all that on Friday, he still also gave the Sixers 30 on offense -- on decent shooting, with good decision making, and getting to the free-throw line (and putting Boston in foul trouble). That's an MVP performance. That's a performance worthy of the affection he got from this crowd pre-game, a performance worthy of his adorable son's adorable T-shirt. That it didn't end up with the Sixers winning the game and taking a 2-1 series lead over Boston is because the team was built to give Embiid more help on offense than on defense, and in Game Three they didn't come close to giving him what he needed on that end. That's obviously an indictment of Harden, Maxey and Harris, maybe it's an indictment of Daryl Morey for putting these pieces in place and/or of Doc Rivers for not getting better results out of them too, probably it's also an indictment of this entire cursed franchise and all the spooky bullshit we've had to deal with since Andrew Bynum's knees first turned to apple butter back in 2012. But it's not an indictment of Joel Hans Embiid. He was marvelous on Friday, the way he's been marvelous all season.
As long as we have this Embiid, we still have a chance in this series. The main reason I feared a fairly decisive Boston victory in this series was because it was clear Embiid wasn't going to be 100%, and if we only got the version of Embiid we got in last year's Heat series, I thought the gap between the two teams was too great for us to overcome. Maybe Jo will wear down still in the games to come, but so far he's been significantly better than he was against Miami. If that's the case, then it's just up to the rest of the guys to not play like total dogshit for us to have a real chance of evening up this series on Sunday and making it a best-of-three -- as Boston gets progressively tighter, like they have all season. Maybe that's too much to ask; if so, hell yes this team is gonna look a lot different next year. But we did already get one performance like that in Game One of this series, so it's not like they're totally incapable.
And even if we don't, and Boston completes the 4-1 Douchebag's Sweep... it'll suck, but if Embiid stays playing at this MVP level throughout, I won't be totally despondent. Getting to the conference finals (and hopefully further) was the primary objective for the Sixers this season, and anything less than that is going to be a capital-F Failure without any additional context needed. But the secondary goal for this season was for Embiid to get through a whole postseason while remaining at peak performance, undaunted by pressure and injuries and a difficult matchup and still looking like the best player in the world, for any potential series loss to be in no way attributable to him. He's got a long way to go to get past that hurdle still, but if he does -- in the same season where he finally won the MVP -- it'll be almost (well, almost almost) as big a deal for Embiid as finally making it past the second round, and would be something both he and the Sixers would reap the benefits of going into their next playoff push.
Of course, Embiid kicking ass and the rest of the team sucking shit is going to bring out the doomsday preppers on Twitter and radio who are already expecting Jo to be wearing a different jersey come next postseason. I guess it'd be naive to totally disregard such notions, and obviously this is a subject best saved for the summer anyway. But I do believe that the pre-game display on Friday -- and Embiid's messaging throughout his entire post-MVP media tour -- is a pretty clear indication that his relationship with the fans here does mean more than your average star athlete and the team that drafted them, and that he won't angle to leave us until he really has to. That moment may still come someday, but even if things go off-the-map south this series, I think we're still due at least one more relatively rumor-free post-MVP year with Joel still trying to make it work in Philly before things really get churning there.
I'm sure I'll get some shit for even trying to find the silver lining in a loss that, given the timing and context, was one of the most catastrophic in Process history. That's fair. But just as Embiid winning the MVP means about as much to me personally as any playoff success the team may end up with, I feel like these kind of postseason performances from the Big Man deserve to be commemorated as more than just an asterisk on a long list of Game Three-related grievances. He's worked too hard to get here, and we've all been through too much together, to take them for granted. Now we just have to hope the rest of the team can get their fucking act together in time for us to appreciate them for longer than just the next couple of games.