Donnellon: Embiid a big reason Sixers are turning heads in guard-dominated NBA
'IT'S A GUARDS' league," Brett Brown was saying before Wednesday night's game, his most recent attempt to siphon a little helium from the high his team has provided this town since the New Year began. The Toronto Raptors were the night's foe, with a pair of guards who boast 17 seasons of experience and a bounty of accomplishments and accolades between them, and his team was sending out a guard tandem with a total of three seasons between them, not to mention a bounty of lingering doubt.
"It's a guards' league," Brett Brown was saying before Wednesday night's game, his most recent attempt to siphon a little helium from the high his team has provided this town since the New Year began. The Toronto Raptors were the night's foe, with a pair of guards who boast 17 seasons of experience and a bounty of accomplishments and accolades between them, and his team was sending out a guard tandem with a total of three seasons between them, not to mention a bounty of lingering doubt.
What he conveniently left out, of course, for the noble purpose of keeping his team grounded, is that his team also again started the 7-2 source of our feel-good, a player with 29 games of experience who continues to leave the impression he has played 100 times more than that, that there was a previous life where he learned all the things he continues to do on court, against increasingly better opposition.
"The scary thing is he is still has things to improve on," Gerald Henderson said after Joel Embiid scored 26 points in 26 minutes of play in the Sixers' latest league-rumbling victory, a 94-89 defeat of a Raptors team that pushed the champion Cleveland Cavaliers to the brink in last year's Eastern Conference Finals, a team Brown expressed envy of before and afterward for building a lasting model through patience and smart talent acquisition.
Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan are at the top of that evaluation, and the Raptors' dynamic duo nearly single-handedly rescued their team from an off night produced by the Sixers' unrelenting defensive effort. The pair combined to score 49 of their points, but when Lowry picked up his sixth foul rolling under Embiid's legs after the big man rejected his shot with 20 seconds left, well, it punctuated the strange brew of success the Sixers have quickly become.
Consider that with the game tied at 86 just a couple of minutes before, the Sixers pushed ahead when Embiid rebounded DeRozan's miss and started a fastbreak that, while not particularly pretty, finished with a layup by T.J. McConnell. That, clinging to a 92-89 lead with 5.3 seconds left, McConnell inbounded it to Embiid, who calmly sank his third and fourth free throw of the final minute - and his 36th and 37th of 46 taken over the last three games.
"Every game you look up there and he has 20-plus," said Henderson, in his seventh season. "That's the one thing that has impressed me most is his consistency as a young player. You've got different defenders, different teams playing you differently. That's what separates you as a good scorer in this league. Like DeRozan - no matter what's thrown at him he's going to get his 25."
Embiid, of course, is already so much more than a scorer, or even rim protector, and it starts with his hands. He catches hard passes like a forward or guard. He made a three Wednesday night after gathering a ball from his ankles. He gives it up and asks for it back. Watching the Sixers move the ball around on offense is so intoxicating after what's gone on over much of the last three seasons.
Players once dismissed as stopgaps and rentals now look like viable pieces of the still-to-be-determined future. Even if it's as a backup, McConnell has earned a part in this team's future. Robert Covington made DeRozan at least work for some of those 25 points. The two guards Brown speaks of as part of this team's evolution are probably playing somewhere else, and maybe already in the league somewhere. The civic hem and haw about drafting a point guard conveniently overlooks that Lowry was traded twice before he triggered Toronto's ascent to NBA elite status, and that "The Process" actually began so many years ago - OK, 2013 - by drafting Michael Carter-Williams as the point guard of their future.
"This (Toronto) program would be about five years ahead of us," Brown had postulated before the game. The triggers, he said, were when Bryan Colangelo, then the Raptors' general manager and now the Sixers', drafted DeRozan and traded for Lowry. "They've gained success through continuity, consistency, showing some poise. And now they are one of the elite teams in the East. And probably will be for a while.
"I base a lot on age. I've studied gold-medal teams. I've been lucky to be a part of NBA championships and, when you look at it, Holy Grail is 28, 27, 26, 30. It's not 22. It's tough in the NBA when you're young. And the age counts for something in those experience moments.''
The Sixers have won seven of their last nine, climbing the food chain, as the coach noted, of the Eastern Conference as they've done it. Yeah, there's more to come, and it probably gets much better from here on. But right now, with a 7-2, 22-year-old whose presence and play flies stiffly in the face of those tried and truisms, it's a pretty cool show.
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