Joel Embiid tied his career-high with 50 points on Wednesday night, dismantling the Magic to send the Sixers home with a 123-110 victory.
Here's what I saw.
The Good
• Somehow, Joel Embiid manages to keep topping the standard he's setting himself. The 30-point streak was not enough. Embiid's first quarter against the Magic was as effortlessly dominant as he has been all season, and it was a stark contrast to the play of everybody else on the roster, who could only hold on for dear life as Embiid tried to drag their sorry butts to respectability.
Not a misprint — Embiid shot 8/10 in the first quarter and scored 20 points all by himself, while the rest of the Sixers combined for five total points, shooting 2/11 as a group. And those numbers don't really do the situation justice, because a lot of those misses by teammates were either comically bad misses or shot opportunities created by Embiid in some form or fashion. It felt like every possession that wasn't some form of Embiid attacking Mo Bamba or Robin Lopez was a complete waste of time.
Embiid has been capable of putting up big numbers from the moment he stepped on an NBA floor, but the ease with which he can do it now is stunning. He has big men simply guessing what he's going to do next. When they think he's going to pull a face-up jumper, he's going by them for an easy dunk or layup. When a double team looks poised to force a turnover, Embiid is firing the ball across the court and creating an open look for somebody else.
Teams used to be able to rely on fatigue keeping Embiid from beating them up in transition, but his conditioning has improved so much from his early days that he is running the floor and scoring early in the clock for all four quarters, sealing unequipped defenders and drawing fouls around the basket. If it was a slog to guard Embiid in the past, it's basically an unwinnable battle now, because he's the guy wearing opponents down instead of the guy who tuckers out before winning time comes around in the fourth.
After a miserable first half for everybody else, it seemed Embiid also understood that he needed to keep everyone else involved in order to push this team to a win. Early in the second half, he used the attention he was getting from the Magic against Orlando, spraying the ball around the floor and (briefly) playing a secondary role as other guys got touches and found a rhythm. That was to Philadelphia's benefit, as they went from 10 points down to nursing a double-digit lead heading into the fourth quarter.
But make no mistake, this game was all about the big dude. Trying to make a comparison for his game at this point is so damn hard — you see the shades of Hakeem Olajuwon that have been there since he was drafted, but he borrows from so many greats that it's hard to keep track. As his trainer showed in a video they dropped this week, Embiid borrows midrange lessons from guys like Jordan and Kobe, spent most of last year paying homage to Dirk Nowitzki with one-legged stepbacks, and has stepback range beyond the three-point line, mimicking many of today's top guards. His mid-post game is on another level.
When Embiid uncorked a late-clock three in the third to get points 45, 46, and 47, the big man nearly caved the roof of the building in, earning a standing ovation when he checked out of the game to get a well-earned breather. He is at a rare intersection in Philadelphia, an athlete who can be counted among the very best in their sport who also happens to be loved for who he is, a tell-it-like-it-is guy who has pissed off the locals a time or two but has earned their respect by never backing down or hiding when it was time to answer for his shortcomings.
Here's where we are: Embiid is the sort of every-night dominant people dreamed he could be when he was skipping back-to-backs and only playing in so many games to prevent wear-and-tear on his body. Philadelphia's franchise center is up at the top of the league with very little company, something that is clear whether his teammates have anything to offer or he starts a game off on a negative note, as was the case in his eventual game-winning performance over Miami last Saturday. You are not going to get to see many guys like him play for the Sixers in your lifetime, and I would suggest you enjoy every last moment you get with him.
(And hey, perhaps this is the signal management needs to go and make something happen so he can make a run at a ring sooner than later. I stand by my belief that you're not slapping together a contender at the deadline, but I would find it tough to look Embiid in the eye and tell him reinforcements aren't coming.)
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• It almost feels unnecessary to write about anything or anyone else from this game, but here goes. All it took for the Sixers to get rolling in the second half was Tyrese Maxey getting involved in the game. It didn't feel much more complicated than that, and it feels like if the Sixers would continue investing more time and energy allowing Maxey to lead this team from the perimeter, it would pay dividends.
Maxey getting to run the offense more highlights a few things, and on Wednesday night, it was mostly that he continues to look like a reliable, dynamic shooter, a development that changes what you might think his ceiling is. Watching Maxey pull threes off-the-dribble is going to stop being a surprise sometime soon if he keeps this up, and it is going to put him right near the top of the pecking order heading into the playoffs.
Well, that's if he's trusted with that sort of power, which we'll get to below. But when he gets his chances, Maxey flashes quite a bit.
• His performance is going to get buried under the Joel Embiid night, and there were plenty of warts at the defensive end, but this is the sort of performance the Sixers could use out of Tobias Harris more often. Harris was efficient, he moved well without the basketball, decisive when he had opportunities at the rim and from the perimeter, and he played well off of Embiid, giving him a moving target when the Magic cheated coverage toward the on-fire big.
Also important — Harris helped the Sixers avoid their typical problems executing zone offense, serving as the man in the middle of a brief Magic attempt at zone when they were looking for any way to solve the Embiid problem. With Embiid sealing off Robin Lopez down low, Harris played the setup man and made sure the big guy got the ball, punishing the Magic for looking at the coward's way out.
When the Sixers were at their best last year en route to a No. 1 seed, Harris was often the co-star pushing them to wins alongside Embiid, buoying the offense when the big guy rested. Seeing them work well off of one another in this game was encouraging, and finding ways to profit from that pairing more often might end up defining this year's team.
The Bad
• There can be a fine line between in-game adjustments and overreacting to something that is unsustainable. There isn't a fine line when a single player shoots 7/8 from three in a single half and continues to get those shots up basically uncontested even as the entire arena is aware that he's in the midst of a career-best heater. There are clear cases to throw out the scouting report, and Mo Bamba's absolutely ridiculous run in the first half on Wednesday was one of them.
The biggest Doc Rivers criticism for years and years has been exactly this. His teams win lots of games because he tends to set up a coherent structure and (mostly) gets buy-in from his players, and he runs into walls when Plan A doesn't work and other teams force his groups out of their comfort zone. The Sixers came into this game viewing Bamba as a guy you can simply leave open, a career 32.5 percent shooter from deep who is making just 32.6 percent of his attempts there this season. After, I don't know, the fourth three of the half, perhaps you should do something different to combat the heater.
Unfortunately, playing up on Bamba creates potential fires elsewhere. If Embiid is hugging up on an opposing big, Philadelphia's horrific perimeter defense is exposed a whole lot more with nobody to bail them out at the summit. The same is true if Drummond is stepping out to cover Bamba, even though he's definitely not in Embiid's universe as a rim protector.
• I've been a big proponent of Furkan Korkmaz as a backup ballhandler based on what we have seen this season, and Doc Rivers' lineup switch on Wednesday seems to indicate he backs Point Kork. But things have swung too far in that direction, it seems, and there's one big problem that jumps out at you — Tyrese Maxey is not being used enough as an on-ball attacker, minimizing his place in the offense.
If Maxey isn't going to be a high-volume guy with the starters, I can at least understand that decision because of Joel Embiid's presence on the floor. Run the ball through the big guy in the post and keep somebody like Seth Curry attached to him on the strong side, punishing teams for a quick double. Even that is a shaky decision these days, though, based on Maxey's progress as an outside shooter, and the dynamism he offers off of the dribble.
But if Maxey is going to have his role minimized with the first unit, you absolutely have to get him going and let him have a lot of creative freedom with the backups. We have seen what he is capable of doing as an on-ball attacker with a longer leash, and he has looked damn good with the controls of the team in his hands. Leaving him standing around waiting for something to happen, or worse yet, leaving him on the bench while backups flounder, is an absolute waste of resources and a waste of his talent.
This is becoming a trend, rather than a one-off aberration. They need to utilize their best offensive players on offense. Really not a difficult concept to wrap your head around.
• Well, they don't call him Less Bamba.
The Ugly
• Where do you even start with some of the trainwreck moments the non-Embiid Sixers had in the first half of this game? Pick your poison:
- Andre Drummond missing a dunk in transition as the first quarter ended, blowing a three-on-one opportunity when the shot clock was already turned off
- Furkan Korkmaz getting stripped while initiating a play immediately after a timeout, and compounding that turnover with a clear-path foul
- Georges Niang throwing a pass in transition into the second row
There are more examples we could keep running through, but you get the point. If they were in the process of unveiling their new slapstick comedy routine, this was an excellent debut performance with some kinks to work out. As a basketball product, it was absolute crap, and they should feel bad about it.
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