Things are looking up for Joel Embiid. Since the Philadelphia 76ers' grueling first-round playoff exit, they have made sharp offseason moves, built out their bench, and celebrated the blissful absence of Tobias Harris by signing Paul George to a four-year deal. On paper, the trio of Embiid, George, and Tyrese Maxey is a synergistic one, and Philly enters next season as the only team with All-Stars at guard, wing, and big. Despite being courted via personal phone call from French President Emmanuel Macron, Embiid is about to make his Olympic debut for the U.S. men's basketball team. "I want to honor my son who was born in the U.S.," he wrote of his decision. "I want my boy to know I played my first Olympics for him."
But a fine basketball summer for Embiid hasn't stopped him from getting a little chirpy. As is often the case with him, it's not that he's completely off-base—you can usually understand the kernel of his complaint—but rather there's this sour bouquet of grievance and martyrdom that leaves you wondering: Why is one of the very best basketball players in the world like this?
Since the end of the playoffs, Embiid has been stewing about the Celtics. During Game 3 of the NBA Finals, he wondered aloud if the Bucks' moving Jrue Holiday gave the Celtics the championship—the sort of idle thought you might hear from a friend on the opposite end of the couch, if not from an MVP tasked with getting that same championship. He appeared on the next ESPN pregame show to discuss his post: "That just came up in a conversation that I was having with my people, and I just feel like I had to ask," he said.
Did the bucks give them the championship?
— Joel Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) June 13, 2024
This week Embiid appeared on a new podcast called The Check Ball alongside his skills trainer Drew Hanlen, who built a statistical case that Embiid's dominance has been underappreciated due to underperforming teammates. Hanlen, testing out his Cameroonian accent, mimicked Embiid's complaints about the good fortune of Boston Celtics forward and recent champion Jayson Tatum: "He's got a superteam. If I had a superteam too, I would win too."
Embiid continued the riff himself. "If I go 5-for-20, we get blown out," he said. "We get blown out." It must be noted that Embiid has been escorted out of the playoffs by some plainly un-super Celtics teams, too. Also, just, the Hawks.
Away from the podcast mics, Embiid was recently interviewed by David Marchese in the New York Times. This is what the big man had to say about 39-year-old LeBron James, who since that interview has already repeatedly bailed the U.S. out of listless exhibition games with bully-ball predicated on his athletic advantages:
You look at the talent that the U.S. has, but there’s equal talent on other teams. And the talent that’s on the U.S. team, you also got to understand most of those guys are older. The LeBron now is not the LeBron that was a couple of years ago. So it’s a big difference. Everybody would also tell you, and you can see for yourself, the athletic LeBron, dominant that he was a couple of years ago, is not the same that he is now. I think people get fooled by the names on paper. But those names have been built throughout their career, and now they’re older. They’re not what they used to be.
NYT
Maybe it's not quite treason, but it does seem like an odd way for Embiid to build camaraderie right before heading into the Paris Olympics with a stacked squad.
From that same interview, here's what Embiid had to say about his own potential to be the greatest player of all time, if not for injuries. Marchese's questions are in bold:
Is the implication that you think you would be in the greatest-player-of-all-time conversation without the injury problems? I think so. I think I’m that talented. Obviously you need to win championships, and to win championships you need other guys. You can’t do it by yourself. I want to win so bad. But if you don’t, you just got to understand that as long as you care about the right stuff, if it doesn’t happen, maybe it wasn’t meant to happen. So, yeah — I kind of forgot the question.
The question was whether you felt as if you were on a greatest-of-all-time trajectory. Yeah. If you think about it, the thing that stopped me all these years is just freak injuries. Every single playoffs, regular season, people falling on my knee or breaking my face — twice. It’s always freak injuries at the wrong time.
[...]
Before we go, I just wanted to say: You know the sports-media hot-take machine is going to go into overdrive because you said that if it hadn’t been for injuries you’d be in the greatest-of-all-time conversation. That’s OK because that’s the truth. I mean, you think about what I’ve been able to accomplish and what has been taken away because of injuries. There’s a lot of what-ifs, but if you combine collectively and individually, you can make the case of being up there.
NYT
Who knows—if not for injury, Embiid might have even been the best center in the NBA over the past four years. That's a start!
