Less than two months after his 27th birthday, Joel Embiid looks like one of the most important players in professional basketball. He's more confident than ever for one reason: He has become one of the most complete superstars in the game.
As Embiid enters his prime, he's the centerpiece on both ends of the floor for the Philadelphia 76ers, who have become a legitimate threat to win it all.
No center has won the MVP award since Shaquille O'Neal in 1999-2000 for the Los Angeles Lakers. That drought should end this year, with both Embiid and Nikola Jokic making strong cases and reminding us that big men still matter. Not only does Embiid rank third in the league in scoring this season, but he also anchors one of the best defenses in the league, a key claim that Jokic cannot make.
Entering Thursday, the Sixers have the best record in the East, and Embiid is the biggest reason for that. Consider this:
Embiid has had a breakout season, and while his place in the MVP race might dominate podcast conversations, that's just a distraction -- the real story here is Embiid and the new-look 76ers appear to be evolving into one of the most sustainable contenders in the NBA.
The arrivals of Daryl Morey and Doc Rivers signified the beginning of a new era in Philadelphia. Together, they've overhauled the vibes around Embiid and Ben Simmons. Morey quickly traded Al Horford and added good shooters like Seth Curry and Danny Green, while Rivers refreshed the actions and the rotations.
The result has been a more cohesive, more spacey ecosystem, which has cleared out the clutter and enabled Embiid to do what he does best. He's scoring more than ever, and he's doing so at a more efficient clip than we've ever seen from him. He's on pace to set career highs in both 2-point shooting percentage and 3-point shooting percentage. When you look at his shot chart from this season, you can see he's filling it up from all over the place.
Embiid is both more active and more efficient as a jump shooter than ever. He has both attempted and made more jumpers than anyone else on the Sixers. He's taking more than 15 jumpers per 100 possessions, up from 13.6 last season, and he's making more than 40% of them for the first time in his career.
Coming into this season, he'd struggled to achieve average 3-point shooting efficiency despite being gifted wide-open looks by defenses that dared him to shoot. But this season, Embiid has converted 36.8% of his 3.1 3-point tries per game.
That's a massive development because defenses now must honor his long-range game, which opens up other opportunities for him and his teammates elsewhere.
The bigger development has come inside the arc, where Embiid now shows off a feathery touch on midrange shots. He's attempting 11.4 non-paint 2s per 100, the highest such number among the 83 players who have tried at least 100 midrangers this season. Oh, and he's making them, too, converting 43.6% of his non-paint 2s this season. That's not only the highest such mark of his career by far, but it also changes the math on how teams must defend him away from the rim.
Early in his career, opponents could let him shoot, but those days are gone.
While his outside shooting has developed, it's his nightly performances on the low block that provide us all a reminder of the virtues of a style of play mostly left for dead in recent years. For decades, big post-up centers like Embiid dominated the NBA, but post play rapidly declined as the NBA fell in love with 3-point shots, motion offenses and faster-paced action. Post -ups happen more than 50% less frequently than they did just eight years ago.
Since the league added its player tracking system in 2013-14, post-up activity has cratered. That season, NBA teams posted up over 16.35 times per 100 possessions. This season, that figure is 8.17 times per 100.
But that staggering trend does not apply in Philly or in Denver, where the league's top two MVP candidates just happen to be dominating the league via old-school post play.
Get this: Embiid is posting up as an individual more per game than 27 other teams are collectively! Only the Lakers and Nuggets as teams are posting up more than he does.
Jokic isn't far behind, posting up more than 24 teams.
Just like the folks who have made us recently reconsider our stances on mom jeans, Embiid and Jokic are making post play cool again.
Embiid ranks first in the league, posting up 19.3 times per 100 possessions. Jokic ranks fourth, posting up 13.7 times per 100. And out of 19 players who have posted up at least 200 times this season, Jokic ranks first in efficiency, Embiid ranks second.
It's remarkable that the league's top two MVP candidates are both centers who are revising the conventional wisdom of the past 10 years: Centers were supposed to be endangered species; post play was supposed to be dying out.
Embiid is the only player in the league scoring double digits per game on post plays, and his MVP campaign is also a demonstration that the old Mikan-Russell-Chamberlain-Jabbar dance ain't dead just yet.
The pace-and-space era and the 3-point revolution have reformed the ways NBA front offices value the skills of frontcourt talent. The ability to thrive in the post on offense and defense used to be paramount. Now it isn't, and scouting reports for big men now examine their abilities to guard multiple positions, shoot from 25 feet, run the floor, grab rebounds, protect the rim, and serve up dribble-handoffs to the guards and wings they share the floor with.
As a result, the players attempting to stop the post actions of Embiid and Jokic might not be as common or as equipped to defend these actions in years past.
Just as post offense is a lost art, so is post defense. That is great news for Embiid, who is on the right side of his prime, one of the most imposing post players this league has seen in decades and still getting better. Embiid and Jokic would have thrived in any era, but in the context of the modern NBA, in which strength and size are less prioritized, there is a mouse in the house more than ever before.
As a defender himself, Embiid provides the Sixers with quite the opposite. As a 280-pound 7-footer with a 7-foot, 6-inch wingspan, he's among the league's biggest and best defenders.
The Sixers rank second in defensive efficiency in the NBA this season, giving up just 106.8 points per 100. While they decorate the defensive end with an imposing fleet of willing, savvy and sizable defenders, they play their best defense when both Simmons and Embiid are on the floor. Simmons is one of the world's most talented perimeter defenders. The combination of his point guard instincts, his defensive will and his own physical prowess make him a solid Defensive Player of the Year candidate. Meanwhile, Embiid is both an elite rim protector and rebounder.
The numbers are staggering.
Philadelphia is 32-6 in games in which Embiid and Simmons have played, a 69-win pace in a full 82-game season. In the 1,066 minutes in which they've shared the floor, Philadelphia's net rating is an absurd plus-16.2. That's the highest such mark among any two-man combo in the Eastern Conference (minimum 1,000 minutes played), and it has a lot to do with getting stops; with Embiid and Simmons on the floor, Philly's defensive rating is an eye-popping 102.2. If these guys can stay healthy, Philly's crunch-time lineups will be two-way nightmares for anyone.
At 27, it's impossible to watch Embiid and not think of former GM Sam Hinkie, and the early days of Embiid's pro career. It didn't look good. How many players miss two entire seasons of play before eventually turning into franchise players? Not many, but that's exactly how Embiid's arc began in Philly, which makes what he's doing right now even more impressive.
Along with Jokic, Embiid is making centers great again, but along with Simmons, he's also further validating the radical team-building process Hinkie designed eight years ago. No matter what happens from here on out, Embiid's eventual legacy will be tied to that polarizing tanking experiment.
No center has won the NBA MVP since Shaq did so in 1999-2000. That's about to change. Centers are relevant again, but that's not all. Basketball in Philadelphia is relevant, too. And even though Embiid might come up short on the MVP vote this season, it would be foolish to label this regular season anything short of a triumph. As a player, he has yet to reach his ceiling, but he has driven himself into the MVP conversation, and in the process, he has taken the 76ers from a punchline to the top of the Eastern Conference.
That was the plan all along.
