If Joel Embiid can stay healthy, he and the Sixers can own this city | Mike Sielski
His personality and boldness at the lottery showed he believes hes already a star. But his injury history remains a reason for skepticism.
He owned the room. It was a big room, the Grand Ballroom on the third floor of the New York Midtown Hilton, and Joel Embiid made it seem so damn small Tuesday night at the NBA lottery. Yeah, he's 7-foot-2, and he was the tallest person in the place, but it was beyond a matter of his sheer size.
To his right sat the second-most-important 6-foot-9-plus point guard in his life, and soon enough, Magic Johnson was bantering with him and belly-laughing over Embiid's trust in The Process and Magic's playful assurance that the Lakers would end up with a top-three pick. To his left, he delivered that stone-cold, deadpan stare into the ESPN cameras and let everyone at home or the local sports bar in on his Andy Kaufman-style joke. Then, after the revelation that the 76ers would pick third in this year's draft, Embiid - who has played 31 games over three years for a team that has had two winning seasons over 13 years - issued a matter-of-fact challenge to LeBron James, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and every other franchise in the Eastern Conference.
"I think we're gearing up at the right time," he said. "When we start getting good, that's when Cleveland and LeBron will start going down. So I think we're at the right time, and when it's all said and done and we actually mature and are ready to compete for a championship, we'll be great."
Wouldn't it be nice just to have a winning season, Joel?
"I think next year is going to be a great year," he said. "We're going to have expectations to make the playoffs so I'm excited about that. When I say we are going to be ready to win when the Cavs are going down, that doesn't mean, like, five years. Next year I think we are going to be ready to win. And now it is a matter of everybody growing together and learning how to play with each other to really compete to be a title contender."
What was weird about Embiid's boldness and braggadocio was that, to him, it wasn't weird. This kind of talk never is to him, and it's the most jarring juxtaposition of the stardom that he has achieved so far with the Sixers: Comparatively speaking, he hasn't done all that much to earn it. Since the first day of last season's training camp, when he bemoaned the deterioration in the actual and aesthetic quality of college basketball, he has carried himself as if he is already an established, accepted power player in the NBA, on par with James, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook. At the least, he presumes he will be on their level soon.
So much of the league's popularity now is rooted in the personalities of the athletes, the gossipy, do-Russ-and-KD-get-along-style narratives that drive so much discussion, and Embiid is a marvelous fit for this modern NBA. He is charismatic, active and funny on social media, and even from the snippet he showed everyone last season, mercy, he can play, averaging 20.3 points per game, scoring at a per-minute rate that was the best of any rookie since Wilt Chamberlain more than a half-century earlier. More, he seems acutely aware of the influence he wields within the organization. Forget the bland platitude of taking the best player available. Asked whom the Sixers ought to draft, he had names at the ready: Kansas' Josh Jackson and Duke's Jayson Tatum. "I expect one of those guys to be at 3 with us," he said.
It was fun to hear Embiid speak this way, but for the Sixers and their fans, another expectation is more pressing and concerning: whether Embiid will be with the team, in the lineup, all season. Having undergone left knee surgery in March, he has been taking jump shots and rehabbing in a swimming pool, and the Sixers' and their medical staff's primary concern, he said, is not the meniscus that the surgeons repaired, but the bone bruise that he suffered in a January game against the Houston Rockets. An MRI exam in two or three weeks will tell the doctors whether the bruise has healed - though, after last season's uncertainties and half-truths about Embiid's knee and Jahlil Okafor's knee and Ben Simmons' foot, one wonders if the Sixers' doctors can actually tell whether the bruise has healed.
"He's doing very well," general manager Bryan Colangelo said Wednesday. "He's showing all the signs of being healthy and able to play. I think with what we saw, we got a taste in January of what this team was capable of when he's playing on all cylinders. That's what we're hopeful for, and that's what we're excited about in the future."
If Embiid can do that, if he can put his injury-laden past behind him and reach his potential, he could own this town, just like he owned that Manhattan ballroom. He could put the Sixers in a position to make those boasts about supplanting LeBron James more than merely empty promises. But it's good to remember something: That spectacle Tuesday night was just a TV show, nothing more, and the true proof of Joel Embiid's greatness and staying power as a star will be something much simpler: the good health that, so far, not even Embiid himself has been able to guarantee.
@MikeSielski