PHILADELPHIA — The big fella wasn’t ready to leave just yet. The game was over, and so were the on-court interviews, and the rest of the team was back in the locker room waiting for Joel Embiid to return from the latest line on his MVP resume.
But the stands at the Wells Fargo Center were still pulsing with a few thousand fans who didn’t want to leave yet, and, truth be told, the feeling was mutual. Walking around the court with a signed souvenir basketball suction-cupped to his gargantuan hand, Embiid scanned the seating bowl with a series of long, performative glances. He looked to his left, and then to his right, and then he wheeled around and looked behind the basket.
With each turn, he heard a different section of the arena rumble further to life, the mere direction of his face causing the energy in front of it to swell, like a compass in reverse. Embiid raised his arm as if to throw, then lowered it, then raised it again.
Then, in one smooth motion, he locked in on a target, and planted his left foot, and dropped the ball like a punter, and used his right foot to send the parting gift sailing ballistically into the stands. As the crowd shouted its approval, Embiid lowered his head and jogged toward the tunnel. His exit was complete.
Moments like these have long been the subtle genius behind Embiid’s remarkable rise from civic punchline and bust-in-waiting to one of the most popular athletes in this city’s history. You win the crowd, you win the town, and the streets of Philadelphia have been in his possession for a solid five years now.
He might not always sub himself into random pickup games and dunk on South Philly locals. He might not always play late-night tennis matches in public parks and then jog home alone through the streets like Big Foot in the dark. When he does, though, everyone remembers. Such is his sense of timing. More often than not, those who win the crowd are those who best understand it.
The difference between the Embiid of this season and the Embiids of seasons past lies in the maturation of his understanding. His endearing traits are without question. Philly loves a player who incorporates the city into his act, who seems to genuinely enjoy representing the populace, who looks and sounds the way most 9-to-5ers imagine they would look and sound if thrust into the spotlight. But what Philly loves more than anything else is a player who is the best at what he does. And Embiid finally seems to understand what, exactly, that entails.
Take, for example, the Sixers’ 121-106 win over the Bulls on Monday night. The Sixers were coming off a road loss to the top-seeded Heat, a 99-82 stinker in which Embiid missed 11 of his 15 shot attempts and finished with 22 points. It was a forgivable defeat, for a variety of reasons. The Sixers were playing the business end of a home-road back-to-back less than 24 hours after a hard-fought 125-119 win over the Cavaliers. James Harden was in street clothes due to a previously scheduled maintenance day for his hamstring issue. The Vegas books had the Sixers as an underdog and they did not disappoint. It was just their eighth defeat in 30 games and their first since Harden joined the lineup a little over a week ago. Yet Embiid seemed to take it personally.
As he rewatched the loss to the Heat, Embiid had seen the reemergence of a player he’d worked hard to bury. Too often, he caught himself lingering around the 3-point line instead of banging in the paint. Against the Cavs and the Heat, he shot a combine 0 for 10 from downtown while attempting just 19 2-point shots.
“As I’ve been watching the last two games where I haven’t been myself, I saw that — and I’ve got to talk to him, too — I saw that I’ve been hanging out at the three-point line a lot instead of living in the paint,” Embiid said.
He relayed this diagnosis to Harden, along with the antidote he prescribed for himself.
“I told him that [Monday night], I’m just rolling to the basket,” Embiid said. “I don’t want to pop, I don’t want to stay at the three-point line. I just want to ether short roll or fully roll so it creates wide-open shots for other guys, because [defenders] don’t tend to leave me … and it creates a lot of shots for other guys.”
By the end of the night, he scored 43 points on 15-of-27 shooting while forcing Bulls big man Tristan Thompson into five early fouls and abusing undersized backup Tony Bradley. It was the 10th time this season Embiid finished with 40-plus points, three more than the player with the second-highest total and the most by a Sixer since Allen Iverson did it 15 times in 2005-06. He has scored at least 30 points in 29 of his 52 games and is averaging 32.9 over his last 34.
Of all of those numbers, it might be the 52 games he has played that matters most. His start against Chicago gave him his highest number of games played since 2018-19 and left him just 13 shy of a new career high. Part of that is attributable to luck, sure, and we’ve seen that luck run out before. But we’ve rarely seen Embiid looking like he did on Monday night, checking back into a tightening game midway through the fourth quarter and looking little different from the player he was at the jump.
For 36 minutes, he was as active as he has ever been on the defensive end, sliding out to the foul line to contest DeMar DeRozan’s maddening midrange game, sliding back down to the block while shadowing Chicago’s multiple ballhandlers, spinning around to the opposite block to body up Thompson. After each stop, there he was, running the court, trailing Harden in transition, settling into the paint for another round of blows.
“He’s in great shape,” coach Doc Rivers said after the win. “Compared to two years ago, unbelievable. Compared to last year, even a lot better.”
The masterpiece that Embiid is painting this season is a portrait of the athlete as a fully formed man. He still has his fun, and posts his memes, and throws his subtle shade. But all of it is now imbued with the palpable maturity of a competitor who understands that a player who sincerely wants a championship must approach the task with a businesslike focus.
For all of the Sixers’ strengths, it is this maturity that might be the greatest reason to believe that they might actually exceed the expectations drifting high above their heads. Embiid’s excellence has finally reached that rare point where it is routine, even workmanlike.
When a team has a player like that, its season tends not to end.
