The NBA hung the Sixers out to dry, but Joel Embiid salvaged the night with his grit | David Murphy

There was a moment late in the third quarter Thursday that should make the haters reevaluate their takes on Joel Embiid. The Sixers were locked in a battle that they had no business losing by anything less than double digits. Embiid was barely 24 hours removed from a game in which he almost didn’t play, and his body was dripping with what might have been the long-lost remnants of the Aral Sea. Doc Rivers was trying to do the sensible thing and give his big man a break. But when Embiid saw Dwight Howard at the scorer’s table, he did the sort of thing that has made plenty of lesser players a hero in this town. He raised a hand, and he waved him off.

Spoiler alert: The Sixers did end up losing, and they ended up losing badly, and there are very few positive things that you can say about the way they went about doing it. What was supposed to be a showdown between two of the top contenders in the East turned into a 124-117 Sixers loss that was over before it started.

Any chance the Sixers had of beating the Bucks without Ben Simmons was eliminated by the NBA’s decision to schedule the game such that the home team was playing on three days’ rest and the visiting team was playing the back end of a home-road back-to-back. It was the latest piece of evidence that the NBA entered this season hoping that its fans wouldn’t think too critically about it, and the Sixers shrugged it off exactly as they should have.

» READ MORE: Sixers can’t overcome starting lineup’s first-half struggles in 124-117 loss to Milwaukee Bucks

“Right when the schedules come out, you look at it, and you compare,” Sixers coach Doc Rivers said. “When I looked at it and I saw home against Phoenix and then Milwaukee — what you do immediately is you look and see what Milwaukee’s doing. You assume that they’re playing a back-to-back. And then you find out they have three days off, you’re like, this is a scheduled loss. We’re going to have to be superhuman to come in here. ... It’s disappointing when I saw it, because what it told me is they didn’t think that we would be where we would be.”

That it nevertheless felt like entertainment was a tribute to one man. Embiid’s performance against the Bucks probably won’t warrant a line on his MVP resume, but it probably should, because he did the No. 1 thing that MVPs are supposed to do: He made it a game. With a bum left knee and a body that had to have been aching after scoring 38 points the night before, Embiid spent 27 minutes doing everything he could to keep two-time reigning MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo off the scoreboard and put his own team on it.

He didn’t succeed. He didn’t come particularly close. But he tried about as hard as a player can possibly try in such circumstances, and that counts for something. With Simmons missing his third straight game due to illness and the Sixers coming off a spirited loss to the Suns, the Sixers had no choice but to ask Embiid to be James Harden on one end of the court and Dennis Rodman on the other.

If it wasn’t apparent at the start of the game, it was clear eight minutes in as the Bucks raced out to a 33-13 lead that somehow felt like little more than a prelude. As bad as it was, you couldn’t do anything except shrug your shoulders. In a playoff series, with both teams at full strength, the Sixers match up with the Bucks as well as any team in the league. The combination of Embiid and Simmons has consistently proved to be the only real antidote for Milwaukee’s ability to station their center on the three-point line and give their quick-twitch, 7-foot four-man the ball in space.

Rivers entered the game knowing that a reasonable coach could not ask Embiid to play 35 minutes of defense on Antetokounmpo even on a normal night, let alone one in which he was playing his second game in 24 hours on a knee that had recently sidelined him for 10 games.

“We don’t want to kill him,” an exasperated Rivers said after the Sixers fell to 39-20.

But he eventually relented, and Embiid somehow managed to stabilize things. For two quarters, the game turned into a glorified one-on-one duel between two of the game’s most freakishly proportioned players, one of them faster, the other one stronger, both seemingly convinced that he held the advantage. It was a heck of a thing to watch, and there were plenty of close-ups when you saw the sort of fire from Embiid that his critics often complain that they wish he had.

It just wasn’t sustainable. Rivers knew it. Antetokounmpo knew it. Simmons surely knew it as he watched on TV. The only person who didn’t seem aware of the impossibility of the task was the man who had taken on the responsibility of completing it. Each time down the court, Antetokoumpo squared up at the three-point line and stared down Embiid at the elbow. Embiid won the early battles. Antetokoumpo won the rest. The Sixers battled back, the Bucks pulled away. Finally, midway through the fourth quarter, Embiid headed to the bench.

“We were gonna watch his minutes tonight anyway,” Rivers said. “Everybody seemed fatigued. It wasn’t just Joel. Joel played better than most of our guys.”

The final line wasn’t pretty. Embiid: minus-19, 9-of-21, 24 points. Giannis: plus-25, 8-of-15, 27.

Still, the end result only proved a small handful of things. One, Simmons brings a bunch of things to the court that you might only realize when they are no longer there. The Sixers shouldn’t be scared of the Bucks. The Nets, yes. The Heat, yes. But they match up with Milwaukee. Two, the NBA did a greater disservice to itself than it did to the Sixers with the scheduling of this game. If it did not think this game would matter, that’s on the league. Three, and most significantly, Embiid’s case for MVP is far greater than his gaudy offensive numbers. Wherever their postseason ends, he is the type of player who will make it a series.