There's no reason why a sudden, unplanned team meeting has to be a bad thing. Maybe it's a good thing! Maybe your veteran teammate is calling the team meeting, immediately after the conclusion of a road game, because he wants to shower someone in much-deserved attention, or to announce that he just got a great deal on car insurance. You can't know until you have attended the meeting. Best not to burden yourself with anxiety. Best to go into the meeting expecting it to be happy and celebratory.
Kyle Lowry, veteran guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, did not recently get a great deal on car insurance, or if he did, that was not why he called Monday's meeting. The 76ers had just played listlessly and disjointedly and had their butts pretty thoroughly hacked off by the Miami Heat, their fourth consecutive loss, dropping their record to a league-worst 2–11. It was Lowry's impression that the team—which if healthy and united should very reasonably expect to make another playoff run—needed to clear the air and share "a call to action and urgency," as sources described it to ESPN's Shams Charania.
A team does not ever want to have this particular meeting, certainly not just 13 games into a regular season, but the meeting itself can be productive, even healthy. A few seasons ago the Boston Celtics had an emotional players-only meeting in the first week of November, amid a crappy start, and later that season they took the Golden State Warriors to six games in the NBA Finals. Probably it was not the meeting that made their season, but the point is that a good team with a solid culture can have a fraught airing of grievances in the first quarter of a season without it signaling that they are headed for the toilet of dysfunction. And from the sound of it, Philadelphia's players and coaches—both groups were in the meeting, which is probably a good sign—largely want the same things: Charania says the veteran Sixers would like for head coach Nick Nurse to coach them harder, and Nurse and his assistants would like for their players "to practice with purpose and attention to detail."
But practicing like you mean it—yes, the 76ers are once again talking about practice—will only get a team so far. There is an elephant in the room, and that is only slightly a dig at the current physical condition of Philadelphia's best player. Joel Embiid has not been healthy so far this season, and unlike in previous seasons, where Embiid has worked his way into shape over the course of October and November, his prodigious skills are not coming close to making up the difference. Embiid, in his age-30 season, has appeared in just three games, and he looks real bad, rickety and lost and exhausted. He's giving the Sixers just 15 points per contest on dismal 49-percent true shooting, and the team is producing a gut-churning, entirely unsurvivable 86 points per 100 possessions when he is on the court, more than 21 points worse than when he is off. More than a third of Embiid's shot attempts so far have come from beyond the arc, not necessarily in itself a terrible statistic except for how it describes Embiid's worrying state of immobility. Monday night, Embiid attempted just 11 shots and zero free throws in 31 minutes of action. Playing your way into shape is acceptable generally only when it does not mean playing your team out of a contest.
It was maybe not Embiid's alarming condition that inspired the meeting—Lowry et al. probably do have other things they'd like to address—but with all due respect to Tyrese Maxey and Paul George, it's not an exaggeration to say that whatever is left of this period of title contention rests on Embiid's shoulders. If he can't get back to dominating, the Sixers are at best an also-ran, even in the deeply shitty East. If he can't even be a functional part of an average NBA offense, the Sixers might truly be one of the shittiest outfits around. In news that I'm sure will have Marcus Hayes dancing on the graves of entire branches of the Embiid family tree, Embiid's teammates have noticed that he may not be taking the early stages of this season as seriously as he should. Maxey, to his enormous credit, reportedly addressed the matter head-on:
In the meeting, Maxey challenged Embiid to be on time to team activities, calling out the former league MVP about being late "for everything" and how it impacts the locker room, from other players to the coaching staff, sources briefed on the meeting told ESPN.
Maxey and Embiid have a close friendship and have a history of holding each other accountable, according to those around the team.
Charania reports that Embiid "accepted the messages" delivered in the meeting, but that he expressed confusion "about what the 76ers are attempting to execute sometimes on the court." This being a Shams joint, that statement could have multiple meanings, or none at all. If it means that Embiid said in the meeting that some of Philadelphia's sets and actions make no sense, that is both an appropriate thing to bring up in a team meeting of this sort and also an unfortunate thing to address after your respected teammate has pointed out that you are never around and are fucking up team chemistry. If it means that Embiid is literally confused out there on the court, that will get a huge "no shit" from anyone who has watched him lumbering around ineffectively in the middle of an offense that lately has made the breathtakingly horrific Washington Wizards look like the Harlem Globetrotters. If nothing else, that sort of confusion is the kind of thing that might reasonably be cleared up if Embiid were a more reliable attendee of various team functions.
Embiid was listed as doubtful with an illness all Monday, and was away from the team enough that evidently some of his teammates assumed he would not be playing. That he eventually suited up might have seemed to him like an appropriate signal of urgency about the importance of every contest, but then he went out and played like crap and his team benefited not at all from his presence. A deflated and profoundly joyless Embiid didn't want to talk about the meeting at all after it was over, to such an extent that he claimed no knowledge of it having taken place. He chalked the loss up to missed shots and ball security, but felt that the team had "one of our better nights" in terms of offensive execution, which is such a troubling thing to say after tallying just 89 points in a loss that you cannot rule out that this was intended as a veiled insult. The 76ers are getting by defensively—holding at 17th in the NBA in defensive rating, per Cleaning the Glass—but even there Embiid does not look like his old all-devouring self:
It's fun to clown on the 76ers, and is even more fun to imagine toxic vibes triggering the ignominious downward spiral that signals the death of all the soaring dreams of the Process era, which live only in the alarmingly crabbed corpus of this one player. But Embiid, when he's healthy, is also an impossibly gifted basketball player, and this 76ers roster has the makings, on paper, of a very cool team. Even for a shit-hearted goon like me, it sucks a little bit to think of that potential being wiped away not by an ascendant Orlando Magic (or whatever) but by overburdened skeletons and demoralization. The Sixers need a healthy and engaged Joel Embiid in order to make much of an impression on this NBA season, but Embiid needs reliable bones and ligaments in order to quite literally pull his weight. However shitty the vibes might presently be in Philadelphia's locker room, it comes down to this: If Joel Embiid is cooked, then so are the 76ers. Practice is important, but we are still just talking about practice.
