It took Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid a 76-minute losing half to assess the situation during a late-season game against the Boston Celtics. As is often the case, he felt an advantage.
Amped, a 7-foot-2, 280-pound center, cradles the ball near the top of the key while facing off against Celtics’ Grant Williams, a 6-6 forward crouched on defense as he He waved his left hand at Embiid. It may also have been an act of surrender.
Embiid racked up a ton of extraordinary feats during the regular season to position himself as a favorite to win his first NBA Most Valuable Player Award. In addition to leading the league in scoring for the second consecutive season, with 33.1 points per game, he averaged 10.2 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.7 blocks.
But there was one thing he did more often than anything else, and it was an underrated skill that destabilized opponent defenses and helped lift the 76ers to the third-best record in the NBA: He took 5,526 dribbles.
During that Celtics possession, Embiid needed just two of them — a pair of powerful dribbles to his right as teammates popped out to the 3-point line, dragging defenders with them. Embiid pulled the paint, then created space against Williams with a double pivot before plunging a short, lackluster jump over him.
“How will you stop that?” said Ian Eagle, TNT’s play-by-play voice, during the telecast.
The short answer for the Celtics was that they weren’t. Embiid finished with 52 points in a narrow victory.
Not so long ago, NBA centers made their living by camping near the hoops. Dribbling between the legs near the 3-point line is likely to land them on the bench.
But of course the game changed, and the big lumbering guy became a relic. The modern NBA is teeming with great players who can shoot three-pointers, run combos from a high position, and in some cases, stretch defenses by dribbling like their Lilliputian teammates.
Enter Embiid, whose improved polish as a ballplayer — and affection for the vehicle — made him even more effective as the 76ers face the Nets in the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. Philadelphia leads the series, 2-0, with Game 3 on Thursday in Brooklyn.
“I think he thinks he is He is The guard, Therese Maxi, said of Embiid.
Embiid wasn’t always comfortable with the ball. As a first-year player during the 2016-17 season, he averaged only 0.78 dribbles per touch. In fact, he scored less than one dribble per touch until Doc Rivers was hired as the team’s coach ahead of the 2020-21 season.
Rivers said he had heard at the time from fans who wanted Embiid to stop being dragged into the ocean. Their argument was that he was too big and too skilled with the basket to mess with near the three-point line. But Rivers said he resisted their pleas to turn Embiid into an old-school centre.
Everyone was saying: put him in office! Get him in the position! Rivers recalled in an interview. “But this is the guy who can bring us the ball, who can run the pick-and-roll, and there are very few big guys out there who can do that. He’s a 7-footer and plays like a bouncer, so you know what? Let him do it.”
Last season, Embiid averaged 1.41 dribbles per touch, ranking second among centers behind the Miami Heat’s Bam Adebayo. This season, Embiid averaged 1.18 dribbles per touch Another strong total that once again places him among the league’s most dribbling big men. He averaged nearly 84 tackles per game, according to NBA Advanced Stats, a division of the league’s office that produces metrics based on player-tracking data.
“I think I can do anything on the basketball floor,” Embiid said. “You ask me to be a scorer, I’ll be a scorer. You ask me to be a playmaker, I’ll be a playmaker.”
he shouted across the locker room at James Harden, the team’s starting point guard.
Embiid said, “James, am I good with the ball?”
Harden, who has averaged 4.77 dribbles per touch this season, arched his eyebrow. (It’s all linked.)
“All the big guys want to be guards,” said 76ers forward PJ Tucker. “Why? Because being a bouncer is so much cooler. Who wants to hang out painting and just taking hook shots?”
Along these lines, Maxi admitted he gets nervous sometimes when Embiid grabs a defensive rebound and insists on dribbling himself.
“But at the end of the day, it’s Joel Embiid for a reason,” said Maxi. “There is only one of it.”
In Half Court, the defenders’ accounts are unforgiving. Embiid is skilled enough as an outside thrower – he’s taken three three-pointers per game and has made 33 percent of them this season – that forwards and midfielders should respect him. But if they expand too much by pressing on him, Embiid is able to dodge with them.
“grown ups? Tucker said. “I mean, they can’t guard him anywhere.”
And if opponents try to corner him, Embiid will find the open man.
“For him to do the things he does at his size is ridiculous,” said Norm Roberts, who coached Embiid as an assistant at Kansas.
During Embiid’s only college season, Roberts envisioned him developing into a “Tim Duncan-type guy,” an early sign of Embiid’s high ceiling. During Duncan Hall of Fame’s career with the San Antonio Spurs, he was more of a traditional center – a big guy who could dribble, but someone who pretty much thrived around the basket by shutting down defenders and using a variety of post moves.
A challenge for the Kansas coaching staff was that Embiid did not consider himself a traditional center, which may have been because he was unfamiliar with the concept.
Embiid grew up in Cameroon, playing soccer and volleyball. for him First real exposure to basketball It came at the age of 16, when Luke Mbah Muti, a Cameroonian who was a forward for the Milwaukee Bucks, invited him to a basketball summer camp. Rude, but 6-10-year-old Embiid was agile, and soon found himself playing high school basketball in Florida.
Some early tutorials for Embiid came via YouTube. In addition to studying a video of Hakeem Olajuwon, who was one of the most dominant centers of his era, Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, masterful point guards who set defenders on fire with their speed and sleight of hand, embed him.
“These are the guys I’ve always been most attracted to,” Embiid said. “Obviously they’re much smaller than me, and I can’t move as well as they do. But I like watching the way they move, how fast they go, and I still do. That’s how I learn, and that’s how I try to add to my game.”
He added, “When you look at the best ball players, it’s not necessarily about dribbling. It’s all about footwork. You have to have good footwork.”
Embiid had good footwork at Kansas—his years playing football was a big help—along with great hands and great vision as a passer, Roberts said. But it was still a work in progress, and coach Bill Self set healthy boundaries.
“He always liked to dribble it,” said Roberts, “but we weren’t going to let him dribble it.”
As the 2014 NBA draft became more visible, there were exceptions. When a scout would roll through Allen Fieldhouse in Kansas, Self would run to a basket with a defender so he could handle the ball and “do the Olajuwon stuff” for five or 10 minutes.
“He was doing Dream Shake to perfection,” Roberts said, noting. Olajuwon’s signature spinning motion.
After being drafted third overall by the 76ers, Embiid missed his first two seasons as a pro with a broken foot. Roberts said that those two seasons, in an episodic way, were fundamental to his growth. Embiid, limited in what he could do with the team, had plenty of time to hone his sense of the game – by dribbling.
For his part, Embiid wants to keep getting better. Two keys, he said, keep his bounce low and know when to pick it up. But otherwise he is free to do whatever he wants.
“I don’t think I’m a ranger,” he said, “and I don’t think I’m big.” “I am a complete basketball player.”
Additional work by Andy Chen.