Joel Embiid sounds like Jalen Hurts and Bryce Harper. He finally gets it.

He isn’t talking about starting as an All-Star. He isn’t praying to be the MVP. He isn’t even discussing winning championships.

Joel Embiid is talking about building blocks. He’s talking about being better tomorrow than he was today.

Finally, he’s talking like he’s Jalen Hurts, or Bryce Harper.

» READ MORE: Jalen Hurts was almost perfect in the Super Bowl for the Eagles. Pay him. $250 million, guaranteed.

Finally, he’s talking like a winner.

After the Sixers beat the Grizzlies in the first game back from the All-Star break Thursday, Embiid was given the chance to crow a little bit. He had a chance to say that that game certainly should indicate that the Sixers, the No. 3 team in the Eastern Conference, could compete with No. 1 Boston and No. 2 Milwaukee. After all, Embiid and the Sixers had just taken down the No. 2 team in the Western Conference. He’d played a little sick; flulike symptoms. He’d played a little hurt; sore foot.

He’d played like an MVP: 27 points, 19 rebounds, and 6 blocks, including a career-defining rejection of skywalker Ja Morant with about a minute to play. He’d played like the best player in the NBA, but, in a subtle but significant change of character, he’d spoken like a man with one purpose.

“We’re not worried about Boston or Milwaukee,” Embiid said. “We are worried about ourselves. We can get better every single night.”

Then Embiid played his butt off two nights later in a last-second loss to the Celtics: 45 points, 12 boards, three blocked shots. Not good enough, and he knows it.

“We are right there,” he said afterward. “We’ve just got to be better. All of us.”

He said essentially the same thing after a close home loss to the Heat on Monday, adding: “It starts with me. I’ve got to be better.”

And, with that, in a span of five days in February, Joel Embiid became a leader.

Didn’t he?

He’s shown promise before. Remember all the tears after the quadruple-doink Game 7 loss in the second round in 2019? How he dissolved in the arms of Marc Gasol on the Raptors’ court? How he then wept in the arms of his girlfriend, Anne de Paula, outside of the locker room?

I bought it then. Shame on me.

This time, it’s different.

This time, he sounds like Hurts. Like Harper.

Like the two Philly superstars who took their teams to within a whisker of a title three months apart.

It’s Embiid’s turn.

When Hurts landed in Philadelphia in 2020, he was considered by many to be a long-term project quarterback, a gadget player who might one day be a serviceable starter. Those “many” included me. Those “many” did not include Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie, and they most certainly did not include Jalen Hurts.

» READ MORE: The Sixers’ ‘Process’ era either pays off or fails for good in the next two months

Still, it sounded like hokey, rah-rah delusion when, in October 2021, Hurts said this:

“We have to continue to grow, continue to learn, continue to be one percent better every day. Continue to clock in and buy into that and believe in that.”

He said it after the fourth game of the season, his eighth NFL start, and he’d gone 2-6. He was playing for an odd young coach named Nick Sirianni, having replaced franchise quarterback Carson Wentz at the end of 2020. He’d presided over a home blowout loss to Andy Reid, Patrick Mahomes, and the Chiefs. He had given little indication of what was to come.

Hurts has since won 23 of 30, including two playoff starts. He was runner-up in the 2022 MVP voting. He lost to those same Chiefs in Super Bowl LVII. He’s looking at a $250 million contract extension.

One percent better?

Jalen Hurts is the 1%.

The Phillies had a chance to reach the 2021 playoffs with seven games to play. In the next four games, Bryce Harper went 1-for-14 with no home runs, no RBIs, and he reached base just three times, once via an intentional walk. The Phillies scored, zero, 1, 2, and 3 runs in those games, lost them all, and were eliminated from playoff contention.

“I felt like I let my team down. I let the city of Philadelphia down,” Harper said afterward.

In three seasons with the Phillies, Harper had pocketed $82 million of the $330 million, 13-year deal that marked the franchise’s rededication to trying to win. Harper won the MVP in 2021, but it never mattered to him. It especially did not matter as the Phillies’ season was rendered meaningless. Yes, they would win 82 games in 2021 and record the franchise’s first winning season since Ryan Howard and Roy Halladay did so a decade before.

So what.

”When I signed up to play here, I wasn’t worried about winning seasons,” Harper said. “You build it to be great.”

A year later, playing through a torn elbow ligament for almost seven months, Harper delivered one of the best postseason performances in major league history and carried the Phillies to within two wins of a World Series title.

You build it to be great.

These quotes from Hurts and Harper might not be the quotes that best represent what they’ve done, but, for me, they best represent who they’ve become. They are the quotes that first convinced me that Hurts and Harper are the big brother, the enforcer, the sheriff in their locker rooms.

Embiid has always been the clown. Now, it seems, no more.

It’s amusing that the most narcissistic player in Sixers history now finally realizes, nine years into a bizarre, incandescent career, that winning, every season, is a process. That getting better is the point. That peaking in May and June is all that matters.

This is something very new.

Beginning in 2016, two days after his NBA debut (delayed two seasons by injury), Embiid repeatedly has applied to trademark that unfortunate phrase, most recently Jan. 5. A little more than a month later, perhaps realizing that this might be his last chance to win in Philly, he seems less concerned with selling T-shirts than with winning games.

Embiid spent much of the last seven years campaigning to make the All-Star team, the All-Defensive team, to be rookie of the year or defensive player of the year or to be MVP.

Most of those honors come with a trophy. None of those honors comes with a ring.

The ring is the thing. The ring comes when the team plays its best.

Embiid now seems to understand that.

Finally.