Joel Embiid disrespects the Sixers, the game, its greats, and himself. Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley are right to rip him.
Conditioning again seems to be the culprit.
Joel Embiid often says he wants to be great at his job.
Well, in order to be great at your job, you first have to show up for work. Embiid has been great at just the opposite. Now in his 11th season, he consistently has been in poor condition. This poor conditioning apparently seems to have delayed his debut this season. Embiid won’t play in Wednesday’s opener or the next two games.
When pressed to explain why Embiid, having played in the Olympics just two months ago, is not ready to play the first three 76ers games, irritated Sixers coach Nick Nurse refused. Nurse also issued this damning admission:
“He’s lost some weight.”
What in the holy hell does that mean? It means that Joel Embiid showed up out of shape — again. He showed up out of shape despite playing in the Olympics. He showed up out of shape despite signing a $193 million contract extension last month. Immediately afterward, he announced that he does not expect to play on consecutive nights ever again. That means the most games he would have played this season was 67, but now it’s 64, since he’s out until at least next week.
Embiid’s planned absence brought criticism Tuesday from Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal, the NBA’s version of Muppets curmudgeons Statler and Waldorf.
ESPN reported Wednesday that the NBA will investigate the Embiid situation. The league’s year-old participation policy forbids teams willfully keeping available players off the court.
This unpreparedness for the season has nothing to do with delivering Embiid to the postseason healthy for the first time in a non-COVID year. There’s no reason Embiid can’t be ready to play the season opener, at home, and still be healthy for the postseason. Any argument to the contrary is ridiculous.
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The Sixers aren’t blameless here. Ever since he appropriated the trademark of the team’s rebuild nine years ago and called himself “The Process,” when he finally started to play after missing his first two seasons, he has effectively done whatever he wants to do. That is, except make it past the second round of the playoffs.
The franchise should have nipped his rampant egotism in the bud, but it lacked the character and courage to do so. Now it lives with the monster it created.
The degree of contempt Embiid has for his organization, for his industry, and, especially, for the fans who pay him all of his money is utterly flabbergasting. Because fans buy the tickets, and fans watch TV, and fans buy the products on TV that are advertised. Embiid’s part of the bargain is to show up and play basketball. But he doesn’t even bother to be in good enough shape to hold up this part of the bargain.
It is incredible dereliction of duty. It is entirely unacceptable. Imagine if you will, if you agreed to one of the richest contracts in the history of your industry — say, laying brick, or fixing roads, or cutting lawns — then showing up physically unable to fulfill the contract, and doing so on a regular basis. Philadelphia is supposed to be a blue-collar town. What blue-collar job would allow this sort of absurdity? Embiid is the highest-paid athlete in the history of the town — he’ll make a half-billion dollars by the end of his current deal — but he doesn’t show up for work almost half the time.
This is the franchise that brought you Julius Erving, the game’s most elegant player. It brought you Wilt Chamberlain, the game’s most dominant player. And say what you want about Allen Iverson, but when the ball went up in the air, he gave you everything he had in that 165-pound body, and he did it every night.
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It’s incredible that a city that worships the careers of Chuck Bednarik, Brian Dawkins, and Jason Kelce tolerates this level of unprofessionalism. Do you want Embiid to come back in shape next season? Have him spend the summer with Larry Bowa, Mike Schmidt, and Bobby Clarke.
In pursuing an Olympic medal and apparently decreasing the number of games he can play during this regular season, for which he is paid significantly more than anybody else, Embiid sends this clear message to his teammates:
My desires are more important than you.
In electively missing as many as one-third of the home games, Embiid sends this clear message to the people who pay his salary:
My desires are more important than you.
By showing up for the 11th consecutive season in poor condition, Embiid sends this clear message to all of his peers and predecessors:
My desires are more important than you.
By transferring to his teammates most of the responsibility of positioning the team to reach the playoffs with a home-court advantage, Embiid sends this clear message to them:
My desires are more important than you.
Really, though, it’s about the fans. He simply does not respect the people who pay his salary enough to deign to entertain them. Because that’s what the NBA is: It is entertainment. As much as we try to transform sports into vehicles to vicariously justify our own failings, it is just entertainment. Just like the theater or concerts or the philharmonic or cinema. It is the greatest show in history, but it’s still just a show.
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All of this might turn out to be a tempest in a teapot. I generally subscribe to most of the theories and recommendations of sports science. If there’s some mad-scientist formula that suggests Embiid play only the games whose dates are divisible by prime numbers, or pi, or 7, so be it. The Sixers are pot-committed to responsibly maximize his minutes.
It’s preposterous to believe that maximizing his minutes means him playing almost none of them.
It’s bad luck for the team and its prime diva that newcomer Paul George also is injured, but then, George spends a lot of his time injured. It’s more inevitability than bad luck, frankly, seeing how he’s 34 and has played only 64% of his team’s regular-season games in the past five years.
Which is 3% less than Joel Embiid.
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To this point, Embiid insults the legacies of the thousands of truly professional professionals who made possible his half-billion in projected career earnings. The five most significant players of Embiid’s existence — Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tim Duncan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James — participated in 93% of their teams’ regular-season games in their fourth through eighth seasons. They were out of shape an average of 3½ days a year — you know, about the same number of days Embiid is in shape.
These are the titans whose talent Embiid shares. But talent is all he shares with them.
Not pride. Not respect. Not professionalism. Just talent. Talent has never been enough to be a champion.
More than anything else, championships define greatness.
The Sixers open their season Wednesday night against the Milwaukee Bucks at the Wells Fargo Center. Join Keith Pompey and Gina Mizell at 3 p.m. on inquirer.com/gamedaycentral as they preview the game, and the season ahead.