PHILADELPHIA — For Joel Embiid, this was always the risk.
Late Monday night, Nikola Jokić stood in a snow squall of confetti, a sheepish grin on his face, a metallic basketball in his hand. His teammates surrounded him. Some of them rubbed his do-it-yourself buzz cut. Others rubbed his ill-defined chest. They were congratulating him on that small golden trophy, named in honor of one of the NBA’s greatest centers and also one of its greatest winners. As Jokic raised the Bill Russell trophy in the air, the arena began chanting the three letters it signified.
M-V-P. M-V-P. M-V-P.
I suppose it comes with the territory. Opening your heart always involves a little bit of danger. Whatever you thought about Embiid’s open pursuit of the NBA’s regular-season MVP trophy, you can’t accuse him of being dishonest. He did not hide from it. The lobbying effort, the tears — all of it was out there in the open. Some found it off-putting. Others, harmless. Most would admit that, at some point, it became a little weird.
In the end, Embiid got it. And he deserved it. But he also deserved what he got on Monday night. A chance to think about the stuff that legacies are really made of.
The cynics will say that Embiid and Jokić both ended up with the thing they wanted most. But I don’t think that’s true. Embiid wants to win. He knows the NBA. He knows the benchmark that matters most. He wants to be viewed as a winner. The two questions that actually matter: 1) Does he recognize what it takes to be a winner? 2) Does he have what it takes?
Here’s the thing about winners: You see it reflected in the team as much as you do in the individual. The best teams are owned and operated in the image of their best player. They are like dogs and owners. Forget who resembles whom. They grow into each other. Their identities are inseparable.
That was the Nuggets and Jokić. Jokić and the Nuggets. In beating the Miami Heat in five games for the NBA title, they were a five-dimensional model of the guy at their center. This was true in both spirit and in style of play. You saw it in their pace, in their rhythm, in their decisiveness, in their agility. Most of all, you saw it in the way they orbited around their star.
No doubt, the quality of the satellites matters. Would the Nuggets have been where they were without Jamal Murray’s ability to create and make the toughest of shots? Maybe not. Maybe the same is true of Bruce Brown, the most underrated and underpaid free agent on last year’s market.
Or, maybe there’s a better question. Would Brown and Murray have looked like the players they were if they were playing for the Sixers?
I don’t know the answer. I do know it’s worth asking. You saw it with Murray throughout the Finals. Even in those moments when he was going solo, freelancing, doing his thing, he was doing it with the cover provided by Jokić. The spacing, the gravity, the switches — Jokić did not just create them, he recognized them. He understood how they could be used to the team’s advantage. Sometimes, that meant hitting Brown on a back-cut. Other times, it meant drifting to the exact spot on the court that afforded Murray the most room to work. Always, it meant recognizing that he was the one in control, that he was the one who could dictate the action.
The later the playoffs go, the more you find them populated by players like this. Jokić, Jimmy Butler, LeBron James, Steph Curry. They spend as much time in the conductor’s chair as they do the virtuoso’s. They are the metronome.
Embiid doesn’t need to become those players. It takes a lifetime of hooping to develop that level of awareness. He will never catch Jokić in technical skill. The balance, the passing, the alien-like way in which the ball always rolls in - these are things that you cannot develop in a summer. They are things that a player cannot simply decide to have.
At the same time, Embiid has plenty of innate physical advantages that nobody else has. Jokić will never have the physical presence that Embiid does. He’ll never have the same presence in the middle of a defense. He’ll never have the same ability to get himself a wide-open look from the foul line extended. What Embiid needs is a little better recognition of how he can leverage those things to become a part of an offense that actually flows.
What does that look like? It’s too early to know. A team without James Harden is going to look a lot different from a team with him. In one, Embiid needs to be a little more maestro. In the other, he needs to be a better-greased cog. The point is that winning basketball requires not just a superstar, but one who operates in unison with everybody else. To steal a corporate buzzword, this year’s playoffs showed us the limits of an offense that operate in silos. The ball needs to move. The defense needs to move. Every second of the shot clock needs to create some sort of progress toward the ultimate goal. Naturally, the guy who touches the ball the most is going to be the most responsible.
Embiid has made incredible strides as a basketball player throughout his career. He has proved plenty. Look at the headlines from six, seven, eight years ago. Count the number of people who doubted if he’d even be playing professional basketball right now. First, he would never be healthy enough. Then, he would never be conditioned enough. Then, he would never be disciplined enough. Now, he has been enough of all of those things to be entering an eighth NBA season with six All-Star berths and a scoring average that has risen from 28.5 to 30.6 to 33.1 and, yes, that MVP trophy. Sure, he has lost three Game 7s with a chance to reach the Eastern Conference finals. That’s the point. A lot of folks swore he’d never get that far.
Some of those same people will now look to Jokic as the ultimate confirmation of their criticisms of Embiid. What Embiid needs to do is to prove them wrong again. This isn’t a condemnation. It’s an opportunity for growth.
Part of this is mentality. There’s a little bit of arrested development in Embiid. He didn’t start playing basketball until an age when many of his peers already had scholarship offers. There was a stretch of 31 months between the ages of 19 and 23 when he did not play in a single competitive game. The greatest players tend to be weirdos. Maniacs. They live for that ball to go into that hoop. They implicitly force everyone else to adopt that mentality. It becomes a collective goal. Embiid already has the thing that is hardest to find: the physical ability to make it happen.
It’s funny. The NBA is very much a superstar’s league. It’s very hard to win without them. Yet the thing we’ll remember about the Nuggets is what we remember about the Warriors, about the Bucks, about the LeBron-era Heat, about the Duncan-era Spurs. It’s the ultimate compliment for a superstar.
That, right there, was a very good team.
