Sielski: Embiid's first step is a big one
AMHERST, Mass. - His pregame shooting session finished, Joel Embiid lowered all 7 feet, 2 inches, and 275 pounds of himself into the chair in front of his locker, bending his knees, bending at the waist, ducking his head, all his parts moving in sequence
AMHERST, Mass. - His pregame shooting session finished, Joel Embiid lowered all 7 feet, 2 inches, and 275 pounds of himself into the chair in front of his locker, bending his knees, bending at the waist, ducking his head, all his parts moving in sequence as if he were a self-disassembling folding table. He wore a sleeveless, light gray T-shirt with the words PHILADELPHIA BASKETBALL in blue across the front, and the workout had been rigorous enough to darken most of the shirt with sweat. A week ago, a month ago, a year ago, his day would be ending. It was 6:06 p.m. Tuesday. His day, really, was only beginning.
An hour later, Embiid was crouched at the center of the Mullins Center court, readying to jump center against the Boston Celtics' Amir Johnson, finally having arrived at the moment that he insisted didn't feel so long in coming. It had been 948 days since Embiid last played in an official basketball game, and after two surgeries to his right foot and two years of waiting, it was Embiid himself who delivered a measure of perspective to maybe the most anticipated preseason game in 76ers history: a 92-89 Sixers victory in which he played 12 minutes and 57 seconds, scored six points, grabbed four rebounds, blocked two shots, and emerged without a scratch.
"It's only two years," he said. "I've been alive 22 years. So it's not that long."
Tell that to the Sixers and those who follow them. To those people, those two years felt like forever, and the joy of seeing Embiid in a game that counted (kind of) was surpassed only by the signs that, yes, if that troublesome navicular bone of his remains intact, the kid could turn out to be everything everyone has hoped he might be. There was the expected tentativeness and rust: the slow recognition of his proper defensive rotations; his first three shots of the game, each of which he left short; his instinct, when double-teamed, to try to dribble out of it, only to drift toward the sideline and leave himself with no passing options.
"That kind of messed me up when they started double-teaming," he said. "It's my first game, second quarter, and they're going to double-team?"
But beyond those mistakes that more experience will correct, Embiid delivered enough glimpses of his God-given ability that one thing became clear: Soon enough, the greatest temptation for Sixers coach Brett Brown, general manager Bryan Colangelo, and the franchise's other power people will be to accelerate Embiid's assimilation into the NBA. Brown had said earlier that Embiid was unlikely to suit up for the second of back-to-back games this season, and based on the Sixers' sports-science research, Brown had determined that Embiid would play just 12 minutes Tuesday night, "in four-minute clumps."
Yet already, Brown has stretched that second limit, playing Embiid for nearly 13 minutes against the Celtics, setting no pregame restrictions on what he could do during the game. Taking a catch-and-shoot 20-footer? Pulling down a rebound, taking three dribbles to ignite a fastbreak, and flipping an underhand pass to Dario Saric? The spirit moved Embiid to carry out these actions and more Tuesday night, and there was no way Brown was going to stop him.
"I want him to play," Brown said. "I want him to get up and down. I want to watch him, too. I think he's going to teach us."
What Brown meant was that, for all the impressive practice sessions Embiid may have unfurled, for all those drills in which he dominated a 5-foot-10 assistant coach, the Sixers can't be certain about what he can do on the court until he starts showing them. He needed some time to do that Tuesday. He missed his first three shots from the field, all during his initial four-minute stint before Brown brought him to the bench, but when he reentered the game, he seemed a different player, more confident, more aggressive, and somehow so much bigger than everyone else on the floor.
He spun to sink a fadeaway jump over Celtics center Tyler Zeller, himself 7 feet tall, then charged down to the opposite end to block a dunk attempt by rookie Jaylen Brown. And in maybe the most telling moment of the night, after Embiid flushed a 20-foot jumper in the closing seconds of the first half, he pumped his fist in a manner that said, Damn right. I'm supposed to make that shot.
"After the first basket, everything opened up," he said. "I had more energy. I felt my mentality change. I felt like I was free."
This was a feeling he hadn't known in a long time, even if he had insisted it didn't seem that way. In a startling confession before Tuesday's game, Embiid had said that he had contemplated stepping away from the sport in the fall of 2014, when his younger brother Arthur was killed in an accident. But Joel Embiid came back to basketball Tuesday night, and once he emerged from the shower later in the night, he said, "Honestly, I thought I was going to come out and score 40 points tonight," and his smile seemed without end. It was 10:06 p.m. His day had ended. Everything else was only beginning.
@MikeSielski