Joel Embiid has to be better for the Sixers to keep up with the Celtics and Bucks. Does he get that?

For the NBA’s reigning most valuable player, for the centerpiece of the 76ers’ franchise, Joel Embiid sure likes to portray himself as a merry prankster, just along for the ride as his team trundles to another destination in the desert.

He waited just 41 minutes after ESPN broke the news Sunday morning that the Boston Celtics had acquired Jrue Holiday to take to X (formerly Twitter). “This off-season was fun lmao,” he wrote. And though he tried Monday at Sixers media day to laugh off the post as a comment on what he called “an A-plus summer” — he did get married in July — it was difficult to separate the timing of the tweet from an understandable implication of it.

Holiday is now in Boston. Damian Lillard is teaming up with Giannis Antetokounmpo in Milwaukee. While those two clubs have made major moves to surpass the Sixers in the Eastern Conference, if they weren’t ahead of them already, Embiid is stuck waiting on James Harden to decide whether to pout his way out of another town or show up to play. You might forgive Embiid if he was a tad perturbed about the whole thing, but no, he said, not at all. And what makes you think the Sixers can’t stack up to the Celtics and Bucks anyway?

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“Who said they surpassed us?” Embiid said. “We’ve still got to go out there and compete. You can do whatever you want off the court, but you’ve still got to go out there and put the ball in the hoop. I believe that any team that I’m on, we’re always going to have a chance. We just need to be a little bit lucky. … You need to be consistent. To me, that’s the only thing I’m focused on. For us, that’s what it’s going to take, me being dominant and being myself and everyone just following along.”

The big man can believe whatever he likes. But it requires some heavy-duty revisionist history to suggest that the primary factor separating the Sixers from a championship has been a few fortuitous bounces of the ball. That miracle Game 7 shot by Kawhi Leonard is one thing. Six seasons with a combined regular-season winning percentage of .634, and still not a single playoff game beyond the second round, is another. Too often over that time, Embiid being Embiid has boiled down to him suffering some kind of freak injury, struggling to stay in peak physical shape, or — as in Games 6 and 7 against the Celtics last May — failing to meet the standard that an MVP sets for himself.

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That’s the frustrating aspect of Embiid: He’s smart, and he says all the right things, and he’s a genuinely wondrous player who wants to win a title here.

“If we were to win a championship, it would be for the city and the fans because they deserve it, going through the Process years and the disappointments,” he said. “I don’t think anybody wants to go back to that era of basketball where you have no shot at winning.”

He’s right. Nobody does. Which is why the idea of starting fresh and trading Embiid is so silly. He’s 29. He’s in his prime. You don’t give up on a guy with his talent, at this stage of his career.

But at some point, Embiid has to move to the next stage of his career, the one in which he crashes Kool-Aid Man style through that second-round barrier. If he’s going to troll people on Twitter, if he’s going to frame himself as a victim of circumstance for all of these postseason disappointments, then he himself can’t keep coming up short each spring.

He was asked about his conditioning Monday and made a joke about it: “I didn’t work out at all this summer.” It was a worthy question, though, and maybe it cut a little close for Embiid’s comfort. It should have. From the regular season to those five conference-semifinal series, the decline in his production and in the quality of his play has been profound. His points per game, his shooting percentage, his rebounding — all of them fall off once the second round rolls around.

The journey back to that same threshold promises to be harder this season with Holiday in the division, with Lillard in the conference, with Harden apparently content to sit out and play chicken with Daryl Morey, with Nick Nurse preparing to hand the ball to Tyrese Maxey and have him run the show for the first time as a scoring point guard. Still, Embiid bears plenty of the burden of proof here. Yeah, Boston looks better. Yeah, the Bucks look better. Yeah, even Morey acknowledged the skepticism and cynicism around the Sixers. But it sure would be nice for them to exceed people’s expectations for a change. It sure would be nice for Embiid to start great and stay great, from the season’s beginning to the season’s end, with no drop-off once the games get more meaningful, with no excuses.

» READ MORE: Hey, James Harden, listen up. My advice: Apologize, and come back to the Sixers.

He’s not a passive passenger here. He’s the engine. It’s high time for him to stop running out of fuel before the finish line.

“When you play in Philly, it doesn’t matter who’s on the team,” he said. “If there’s belief that you have a chance to win a championship, no matter what’s going on outside of here, that’s the goal. That’s the standard. You’ve got to go for it every single year of my career at least for the next — how old am I, 29? — eight years. We should go after it every single year to try to win a championship. There should never be any lost seasons. I hope they understand that, and I think they understand that.”

Great. Does he?