Five Thoughts on Joel Embiid's Olympics Performance (And the Discourse Around It)

MOC puts a bow on Embiid's Olympics overseas and the incredibly annoying discussion around it back home.

As I’ve written in the past, one of Joel Embiid’s most unique qualities is his ability to drive everyone completely insane. This summer has been no exception, with a whirlwind of hot takes and outright hatred coming his way due to his up and down performances in the Olympics as well as some of his quotes in the media.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on all of this, and they’re a bit scattered across multiple topics. So bear with me while I get through five mini-tangents about what exactly I think is going on here.

1. Man, that ruled

This entire Olympics basketball experience was awesome – watching legends of the game play together and represent our country was incredible – and as for Embiid individually, that Serbia game was without a doubt one of the most memorable games of his entire basketball career. Whatever other negative publicity he got during this experience is far outweighed by the respect he earned after that game. 

Just having the experience of watching our guy out there in the heat of battle with some all-time greats was a really special viewing experience; it was easily one of the highest-stakes and most intense games that Embiid has ever played in, and he was one of the best players on the floor from start to finish – in a game that included his chief rival in Jokic, no less. 

And most importantly, it was good to see Embiid rise to the occasion in a big spot when he’s developed a reputation for not doing so. In that sense, the national reaction to Embiid’s performance provides us with a good reminder of what can happen if he ever leads the Sixers to a championship – the way that he is talked about will change overnight, and the entire story of his career will be rewritten. It only takes one run.

2. Agenda wars have overtaken NBA discourse

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon a clip of FS1’s Nick Wright talking about LeBron’s performance in the Olympics. He starts off the clip with a statement that was so honest that I couldn’t help but respect it: “I care more about LeBron’s legacy than Team USA.”

That admission was a somewhat sad but incredibly revealing insight into the state of basketball discourse; in a way, it’s unbelievably pathetic to be more consumed by an agenda than by the idea of your country winning a gold medal, but it is, above all else, honest – and I wish more people would admit it. I’d be lying if I said I was 100 percent above it, but I did really feel shocked at the degree to which agenda talk dominated the Olympics discourse when we all should have been sitting back and enjoying watching the best players of this era compete in what might have been some of the last meaningful basketball they’ll ever play. 

Almost all of the discourse around Team USA this summer has revolved around bolstering or denigrating certain players’ NBA legacies, rather than a pure rooting interest for the team as a whole. And really, that’s how a lot of online basketball discourse works these days – you pick an agenda for or against a certain player, you constantly root for and seek out evidence to prove that agenda, ignore any evidence that disproves it, and you try to destroy anyone with a competing agenda. Gone are the days of simpler, more tribal sports fandom where fans really only cared about their teams winning and losing; basketball fandom is far more ideological than it has ever been.

And at a certain point, it all just becomes incredibly tiresome and unserious. So many of these people simply do not give a fuck about what is true and what is not; they only care about pushing the agenda. NBA Twitter people are like rabid dogs frothing at the mouth in search of evidence for their own agendas, and that inevitably leads to a willingness to bend the truth. 

You can get twenty thousand (!) likes on a Tweet clowning Embiid for ducking Jokic in the Olympics when they’ve played each other three times in the last three weeks. And I’m not trying to make this seem more sinister than it really is – propaganda is an art, and I do have respect for it in a certain sense. But at the end of the day, being a full-time propagandist will make you become known as someone who doesn’t really care what is true and what isn’t and who doesn’t really have any sincere contributions to be made to the conversation. There are tons of these people out there and we all know them when we see them.

And just to be clear: this behavior is not limited to anti-Embiid by any means. It can be true of anyone, including plenty of pro-Embiid people. 

3. NBA Twitter brainrot has made people incapable of viewing the world beyond the superficial lens of sports debate talking points

It’s important to make a key distinction here between being a regular, everyday hater and having such severe brainrot that you start to act in extremely deranged and harmful ways. 

If you are the person who clips every Embiid mishap and posts it online with the caption “this guy is the worst,” I think you’re weird, but I don’t ultimately have any grudge against your behavior. If your hatred for Embiid has boiled over into you brushing up against some genuinely awful worldviews, I am worried for your sanity and I think you need to log off immediately. 

What we are witnessing with people like these is a symptom of NBA Twitter brainrot that prevents you from viewing the world with any sense of depth and complexity beyond the hyper-normalized, superficial reality of sports debate talking points; there is absolutely no consideration of the humanity of the people involved or the depth of the decision being discussed beyond “LOL ring chaser.” These are completely ridiculous people whose dopamine addictions are eroding their connection to their own humanity.

Not that this even needs to be addressed, but Embiid is an American citizen who has lived here for 14 years and counting. He has done nothing but speak positively about his time here and has said he feels it is “a blessing to be an American.” He has said that his decision to play for Team USA is in large part because of his son, who was born here: “Most of all, I want to honor my son who was born in the US. I want my boy to know I played my first Olympics for him.”

Embiid also got lambasted on Twitter for suggesting that he may play for Cameroon in 2028. It boggles my mind that the same people who hate him for “ring chasing” would also be furious to see him playing for his native country in the next Olympics. Regardless, it is incredibly bizarre to police this stuff, and it seems to only happen to Embiid; I’ve yet to see someone mad at Eric Gordon for playing for the Bahamas despite having previously played for Team USA in FIBA. Embiid will more than likely only have the chance to play in two Olympics, and personally, I would find it extremely reasonable to play once for his native country and once for the country he resides in.

The reaction to this stuff is all just incredibly weird and is a byproduct of the inability to think beyond the context of sports debate. Some things in life are deeper than “ring chasing” or “running from the grind” – and choosing which country to represent in the Olympics is one of them. I know that a lot of this particular criticism is tongue-in-cheek, but it is honestly a marvel to see people be driven so insane by Embiid that they become half-seriously anti-immigrant. I find these people’s descent into madness to be deeply fascinating. 

Joel Embiid at the Olympics: That'll Do

4. The Embiid haters were exaggerating how bad his overall play had been, but his effort and focus was bad until last week

The discussion of Embiid’s overall impact on Team USA was being greatly exaggerated early on in the Olympics – people were talking about him like Lakers-era Russell Westbrook, and that just wasn’t remotely accurate – but I do think that early on, his performance had been pretty bad by his standards and it was totally fair to criticize him for it. 

Prior to his performance against Brazil last Tuesday, Embiid looked out of shape, unfocused, and just sort of lackadaisical on the court. I would’ve described his effort and focus levels early in those early games as being inferior to his typical effort in a regular season NBA game. It was hard not to notice the difference in body language and focus between him and, say, LeBron.

Watching him early on in the Olympics, I just kept thinking to myself, can you please just be normal right now? There were SO MANY small but careless mistakes that he does not usually make – turnovers in the backcourt, wildly inaccurate passes, terrible attempts at foul grifting, etc. Perhaps his injury recovery was largely to blame for his conditioning and his subpar motor, but I still think it was fair to be frustrated by him and to critique him. 

Even as his play improved and he looked a bit more like himself, I still wouldn’t say he was moving anywhere near the way he normally does; I would put his health level right now at around 80 percent. 

Hopefully, Embiid can take these seven weeks before training camp to reach full health and get himself in shape, because I’m not really ready to consider the possibility that the level of mobility we saw from Embiid is just the new norm. If it is, that’s a tough conversation we’ll need to have, but I think that slimming down a bit and having more time to recover from his knee injury will get him back to looking more like this guy. 

5. Embiid’s national reputation bottoming out this summer makes zero sense

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now: the degree to which national consensus has soured on Embiid after the Knicks series is bizarre to me. That was most likely the best playoff series of his career; he averaged 33, 11, and 6 on 59% true shooting while the Knicks spent half the series double-teaming him on every touch. I have no idea how anyone could have watched that series and thought, “Ah, yep. Another classic playoff choke job from Embiid. Just like every other year.” He had one bad game (Game 5), and a couple of iffy fourth quarters, but when you look at the entirety of his impact, there’s just no case to be made that he wasn’t really, really good.

What’s even more bizarre is that national consensus didn’t change all that much after his 2023 stinker against the Celtics. He was still universally considered a top-five player, and much of the conversation from national media folks was wondering if or when he would demand a trade.

And now, after his performance against the Knicks, many national media pundits have knocked him down multiple tiers, with some arguing he’s somewhere around the ninth best player in the NBA. It’s completely backwards to me; from my perspective, my personal evaluation of Embiid took a major hit after the Celtics series, and made a bit of a recovery after this season. 

I think what’s really happening is A) people didn’t analyze his individual performance against the Knicks closely enough, and B) lots of people just don’t like Embiid and were eager to drop him down a tier in their rankings when given the slightest reason to do so. For a lot of people, the entire takeaway from that series was that the Embiid-led Sixers lost in the first round and the deeper context of injuries and seeding didn’t matter.

It’s just not based in reality, and I would be shocked if by the end of this regular season, Embiid hasn’t earned his way back into that universally acknowledged top-5 status. 

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Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health. Get 20% off E-Lyte, Gut+, and all Body Bio products with promo code MIKESTUMMY at Body Bio’s website.