Though recently one of the best players in the NBA, and perhaps one of the best two-way bigs the sport has ever seen, Joel Embiid was an obscure character in this past regular season. That's because the main agenda for the Philadelphia 76ers was his long-term preservation. No point in rushing anything: Their franchise center ended the 2024-25 season with arthroscopic surgery on his left knee—another injury in a career defined by them—and the team didn't seem bound for big things in his absence. But they wound up securing the seventh seed in a wide-open Eastern Conference anyway, and on Tuesday found themselves in a must-win road game in their first-round series against the Boston Celtics. Despite starting this playoff run with yet another surprise health scare, Embiid returned to former glory with a second-half scoring burst that pushed his team to a 113-97 victory.
The immediate medical context makes Embiid's feat all the more impressive. Last fall, he reported to camp a little slimmer and eased back onto the court, with restrictions on overall minutes and back-to-back games. By January, he was inching toward relevance, logging heavier minutes and handling them well, if not yet approaching the all-time-great peaks of his recent past, averaging nearly 30 points per game. An oblique strain sidelined him for most of March, but he came back in early April—only to contract appendicitis, which necessitated emergency surgery while the team was on the road in Houston. The Sixers had three games to go in the regular season, and poor Embiid was still adding to an already exotic list of career maladies. Led by a young, speedy backcourt of Tyrese Maxey and rookie VJ Edgecombe, Philadelphia still breezed through the play-in tournament to lock up the seventh seed.
But who knew if Embiid would be back in any condition to help them? No matter how carefully the team tried to prepare him for a playoff push, there was no accounting for an exploding appendix, or the complications after surgery. After an April 9 appendectomy, Embiid was, incredibly, back on the floor on April 26 for Game 4, where he had 26 points (on 9-of-21 shooting), 10 rebounds, and six assists in a 128-96 blowout loss. Embiid looked clunky and out of place in that game, negating the things the Sixers had been doing well with smaller, faster lineups in his absence, and his team was down 3-1 in the series. It would've been tempting to tell him to just rest up some more for next season.
Embiid's struggles persisted into Tuesday's Game 5: a quiet, perimeter-bound first half, missing all five of his three-point attempts. In the second half, he didn't shoot a single shot outside the arc. Instead he assembled a vintage mixtape of bruising post play and soft-touch short jumpers, which proved as unstoppable as it had once been. It wasn't without his complications—he visited the locker room after tweaking his knee in the third quarter—but he finished with 33 points, four rebounds, and eight assists in yesterday's win.
I was struck by Embiid's ease of operation as he made seven of his last eight shots. While he was already familiar with the Celtics as postseason foe, Embiid must have been relieved by the matchups in this iteration: He cooked Nikola Vucevic and Neemias Queta in the third and fourth quarters, respectively. Meanwhile his former adversary Al Horford is now a 39-year-old living in the Bay Area, already on vacation.
The Celtics still led 86-85 heading into the fourth quarter, where—stop me if you're read this one before—they failed to break the paint and their jumpshot-heavy offense sputtered out. They shot 3-of-22 in the final frame, missing an astounding 14 field goal attempts to end the game. To assign some credit in addition to shame, the Sixers' defense was superb, even if it was not quite anchored by Embiid as it has been in past years, but instead by its long list of stout perimeter defenders. A 35-year-old Paul George gave them 43 excellent minutes; Quentin Grimes and Maxey rounded out the scoring attack. The theory of this Sixers roster is finally emerging from a two-season fog of injury, and the Celtics will be eager to close them out on Thursday before they start getting any better.
