Joel Embiid’s defense is the reason this MVP shouldn’t have been his first

The MVP is an offensive award, but "big players like Joel, they erase the mistakes we make on defense," Doc Rivers says.

Sixers center Joel Embiid blocks Brooklyn Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie’s layup attempt during Game 3 in the first round of the playoffs on April 20.Read moreYong Kim / Staff Photographer

by David Murphy | Columnist

Published May 2, 2023, 7:57 p.m. ET

BOSTON — The first game on Joel Embiid’s MVP resumé tape? Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals. No, it wasn’t a regular-season game. No, he didn’t play. But that’s kinda the point. The best way to appreciate Embiid’s full value is to take stock of the Sixers when he isn’t there. Because that’s when you see just how much he impacts the game on the defensive end.

I know, I know. The MVP is an offensive award. Defense is no fun to talk about. But isn’t that mostly because defense is so hard to quantify? It’s easy to see the impact a player makes when the ball is in his hands. Offensive performance is easily reduced to factoid-sized accolades.

For instance:

Before this season, the only player in NBA history to finish a season averaging 47-plus points per 100 offensive possessions was James Harden, widely regarded as one of the greatest individual scorers in league history. This year, Embiid averaged 47.4 points per 100 possessions. That’s more than Michael Jordan’s 46.4 in 1986-87, more than Kobe Bryant’s 45.6 in 2005-06, and far more than Nikola Jokić’s 39.7 last season.

This was just the 11th time in history that a player averaged more than 44 points per 100 possessions. Embiid now has three of those seasons, more than any other player on the list.
Embiid’s 33.1 points per game are the 10th highest by a center, with Wilt Chamberlain owning seven of the other nine spots. Bob McAdoo averaged 34.5 points per game in 1974-75 and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar averaged 34.8 in 1971-72.

Impressive, right?

Numbers like that don’t exist for defense. If you can’t prove a negative, how can you prove how much an individual player contributed to a pointless possession? On-off numbers fail to account for too many variables to provide anything better than the broadest of hints of individual impact. Same goes for the counting numbers like blocks and steals. But even the league leaders in those categories will record a block or a steal on roughly 5% of possessions. Much more important is what happens the other 95% of the time.

That’s where Embiid’s impact really shows. The possessions where he looms the largest are often the ones when you don’t notice him at all. He is like a shutdown corner in that regard. He doesn’t get the interceptions. He doesn’t get his name called. His sheer presence forces the action in a different direction.

Consider the experience that Doc Rivers had after Game 1 as he was watching a rebroadcast of the Sixers’ last-seconds 119-115 win at TD Garden. He was already well aware of how thoroughly the Celtics exploited Embiid’s absence with a variety of off-ball cuts and straight-line drives to the hoop. Now, though, he had to listen to TNT analyst Reggie Miller explain to a national TV audience what had happened on each play.

“You kept hearing Reggie saying, ‘There’s no Joel at the basket,’” Rivers said on Monday. “He must have said it 50 times.”

That’s an exaggeration, but only slightly. In Game 1, the Celtics got to the rim 25 times and made 22 of their shots from point-blank range. Their average shot distance was a mere 4.8 feet. Look at how that compares to the Sixers’ four games against the Celtics during the regular season:

Oct. 18: 14-for-18 at the rim, 8.17 shot distance
Feb. 8: 12-for-13 at the rim, 9.35 shot distance
Feb. 25: 21-for-31 at the rim, 5.08 shot distance
April 4: 15-for-22 at the rim, 5.76 shot distance

Think about the disparity between those numbers and the ones the Celtics posted in Game 1. In games that Embiid played, Boston averaged 33 points at the rim. On Monday, they scored 44.

“That’s what he does,” Rivers said. “Big players like Joel, they erase the mistakes we make on defense. They also allow you to be more aggressive.”

With all due respect to Jokić, who has made great strides on the defensive end during his career, no big man in the game has as much two-way impact as Embiid has. He doesn’t get credit for it because 50% of it is on the defensive end. On the scoreboard, though, that half counts the same as the other.

Reality is, Embiid should have two MVPs right now. We’ll give Jokić the trophy in 2020-21, when injuries limited Embiid to just 51 games.

Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if Embiid continues to improve at the same rate he has over the last few seasons. He is still an incredibly raw product. You’d love to see him polish his footwork and balance with his back to the basket. Combine that with a more consistent motor and he might win every award between now and when he retires.

Whatever happens from this point forward, Embiid has already established himself as the game’s preeminent big man. And, this year, its preeminent player.