At so many points during his injury-plagued 19-game campaign a season ago, it was reasonable to think Joel Embiid may never play over 40 minutes in an NBA game again, let alone nearly 48. Even now, he
might not be too hot on that prospect.
“He walked into the locker room after the game and said, ‘There’s no way I should ever play more than Tyrese,‘” Tyrese Maxey said after Embiid played 47 minutes in a 128-122 overtime win over the Houston Rockets Thursday.
Embiid told reporters that he was certainly aware of how much of a workload he took on in the win, begrudgingly acknowledging it was necessary to get his team over the hump in the extra period.
“It feels good if you win the game,” Embiid said.
This pleasant surprise of a Sixers season has been in part because Embiid’s health has been a pleasant surprise. He’s already passed that 19-game mark. His field goal percentage and effective field goal percentage are 30 and 20 points higher than what he put a season ago, respectively.
Every safeguard put in place has, for lack of a better term, ramped him up pretty well so far. First was playing more than 20 minutes in a game. Then it was playing with less than two off days in between games. Now, the only games Embiid has missed in January were parts of back-to-backs.
The production has followed the availability. His 32-point triple-double against the Rockets was his third in a row dropping at least 30 points. He came into the night averaging 26.7 points on a 56.4% effective field goal percentage in the month of January.
It isn’t lost on him that he continues to round into form on the two-year anniversary of the day he dropped a career-high 70 points.
“I was just saying that after the game, maybe I should have a baby on January 22,” Embiid said. “It seems like a good day.”
Whether he was joking about doing those “calculations” with his wife or not, it wasn’t lost on his teammates either, especially those who have been on that two-year journey with him.
“That’s crazy to think about,” Kelly Oubre Jr. said after the game. “It’s been a roller coaster, but at the end of the day, we are still able to find joy in the game of basketball. We’re still able to go out there and compete at a very high level, and he is as well. I’m just super proud of him for just getting through the adversity.”
Even with his scoring numbers rising, his teammates feel like he’s done so while adapting his game too. He’s been able to drive winning without being the franchise’s sun, moon and stars.
“He’s just getting back to himself slowly but surely,” Maxey said, “and he’s doing it in a different way kind of, but like, he’s just really locked in and really bought into his team so we appreciate him for that.”
Embiid admitted those were some of the changes he had to adjust to earlier in the season. Zooming out of everything seems to have helped him not just find a rhythm, but find consistency.
“I just had to take a step back and focus on everything,” he said. “Obviously, I’m not allowed to play back-to-backs yet. So whenever I can play, I’m just happy to be consistent and playing every game.”
He migh not have admitted it in his postgame presser, but he had a little extra something for that Rockets matchup as well. Over the summer during the EuroBasket tournament, former Sixer Furkan Korkmaz said he thought Embiid was the best big man he’d ever seen, but said that fellow Turkishmen Alperen Sengun had passed him.
“You got to have saw the competitive juices,” Paul George said. “He won’t say it, but me in that position, when I was in his spot and there were guys under me that were coming up, I took it personal to still be a force out there. He dominated, big fella took it upon him[self] to really take over and I thought he was vintage Joel tonight.”
Embiid confirmed as much with his postgame Instagram post indicating he was disappointed in his former teammate. There is no better sign that Joel Embiid is feeling like Joel Embiid than a little bit of healthy trolling.
