Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers took a half-beat to evaluate the state of affairs throughout a late-season recreation towards the Boston Celtics. As is commonly the case, he sensed a bonus.
Embiid, a 7-foot, 280-pound middle, cradled the ball close to the high of the key as he confronted up towards the Celtics’ Grant Williams, a 6-6 ahead who crouched right into a defensive stance as he waved his left hand in Embiid’s face. It would possibly as effectively have been an act of give up.
Embiid had quite a lot of extraordinary feats throughout the common season to place himself as a favourite to win his first NBA Most Valuable Player Award. In addition to main the league in scoring for a second consecutive season, with a career-high 33.1 factors per recreation, he averaged 10.2 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.7 blocks.
But there was one factor he did extra usually than anything, an underrated ability for him that destabilized opposing defenses and helped elevate the 76ers to the third-best file in the NBA: He took 5,526 dribbles.
During that possession towards the Celtics, Embiid wanted simply two of them — a pair of laborious dribbles to his proper as his teammates cleared out to the 3-point line, dragging their defenders with them. Embiid pulled up in the paint, then created house towards Williams with a double pivot earlier than he sank a brief fadeaway jumper over him.
“How are you going to cease that?” Ian Eagle, TNT’s play-by-play voice, stated throughout the tv broadcast.
The quick reply for the Celtics was that they weren’t. Embiid completed with 52 factors in a slender win.
Not so way back, NBA facilities made their lunch-pail livings by tenting out close to the hoop. A between-the-legs dribble out close to the 3-point line would have in all probability landed them on the bench.
But the recreation has modified, in fact, and the plodding huge man is a relic. The trendy NBA is teeming with behemoths who can launch 3-pointers, run units from the excessive put up and, in some instances, stretch defenses by dribbling like their Lilliputian teammates.
Enter Embiid, whose improved polish as a ballhandler — and his affection for the craft — has made him much more potent as the 76ers face the Nets in the first-round of the Eastern Conference playoffs. Philadelphia leads the collection, 2-0, with Game 3 on Thursday in Brooklyn.
“I feel he thinks he is a guard,” 76ers capturing guard Tyrese Maxey stated of Embiid.
Embiid was not at all times so snug dealing with the ball. As a first-year participant throughout the 2016-17 season, he averaged simply 0.78 dribbles per contact. In reality, he averaged fewer than one dribble per contact till Doc Rivers was employed as the workforce’s coach earlier than the 2020-21 season.
At the time, Rivers stated, he heard from followers who wished Embiid to cease drifting to the perimeter. Their argument was that he was too huge and too expert at the basket to be messing round close to the 3-point line. But Rivers stated he resisted their pleas to form Embiid into extra of an old-school middle.
“Everybody was saying: ‘Get him on the put up! Get him on the put up!’ Rivers recalled in an interview. “But it is a man who can convey the ball up for us, he can run pick-and-rolls, and there are only a few bigs who can do this. He’s a 7-footer who performs like a guard, so what? Let him do it.”
Last season, Embiid averaged 1.41 dribbles per contact, which ranked second amongst facilities behind Bam Adebayo of the Miami Heat. This season, Embiid averaged 1.18 dribbles per contact — one other sturdy complete that once more positioned him amongst the league’s most dribble-prone huge males. He averaged practically 84 dribbles per recreation, in line with NBA Advanced Stats, a division at the league workplace that produces metrics primarily based on participant monitoring information.
“I consider I can do something on the basketball ground,” Embiid stated. “You ask me to be a scorer, I’ll be a scorer. You ask me to be a playmaker, I’ll be a playmaker.”
He shouted throughout the locker room at James Harden, the workforce’s place to begin guard.
“James,” Embiid stated, “am I good at ball dealing with?”
Harden, who averaged 4.77 dribbles per contact this season, arched an eyebrow. (It’s all relative.)
“All huge males need to be guards,” 76ers ahead PJ Tucker stated. “Why? Because being a guard is cooler. Who desires to hang around in the paint and simply take hook pictures?”
Along these traces, Maxey acknowledged that he generally will get nervous when Embiid grabs a defensive rebound and insists on dribbling upcourt himself.
“But at the finish of the day, he is Joel Embiid for a purpose,” Maxey stated. “There’s solely considered one of him.”
In the halfcourt, the calculus for defenders is unforgiving. Embiid is proficient sufficient as an out of doors shooter — he took three 3-pointers per recreation and made 33 p.c of them this season — that opposing forwards and facilities should respect him. But in the event that they overextend by urgent up towards him, Embiid is able to dribbling by them.
“Bigs? They don’t have any shot,” Tucker stated. “I imply, they cannot guard him anyplace.”
And if opponents attempt to lure him, Embiid will discover the open man.
“For him to do the stuff that he does at his measurement is ridiculous,” stated Norm Roberts, who coached Embiid as an assistant at Kansas.
During Embiid’s lone school season, Roberts envisioned him growing right into a “Tim Duncan-type man,” an early signal of Embiid’s excessive ceiling. During Duncan’s Hall of Fame profession with the San Antonio Spurs, he was extra of a standard middle — a giant man who may dribble, however one who largely thrived round the basket by sealing defenders and utilizing a smorgasbord of put up strikes.
The problem for the teaching workers at Kansas was that Embiid didn’t take into account himself a standard middle, and maybe that was as a result of he was unfamiliar with the idea.
Growing up in Cameroon, Embiid performed soccer and volleyball. His first actual publicity to basketball got here at age 16, when Luc Mbah a Moute, a Cameroonian participant who was then a ahead for the Milwaukee Bucks, invited him to a summer season basketball camp. Embiid was uncooked, however he was 6-10 and agile, and he quickly discovered himself taking part in highschool basketball in Florida.
Some of Embiid’s earliest classes got here through YouTube. In addition to finding out footage of Hakeem Olajuwon, who was considered one of the extra dominant facilities of his period, Embiid was riveted by Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, slick guards who torched defenders with their quickness and their sleight of hand.
“Those are the guys I’ve at all times been extra drawn to,” Embiid stated. “They’re clearly manner smaller than me, and I can not transfer in addition to they do. But I really like watching the manner they transfer, how briskly they’re, and I nonetheless do. That’s how I study, and that is how I attempt to add to my recreation.”
He added: “When you have a look at the greatest ballhandlers, it is not essentially about dribbling. It’s all about footwork. You have to have good footwork.”
At Kansas, Embiid had good footwork — the years he had spent taking part in soccer have been a giant assist — together with terrific fingers and nice imaginative and prescient as a passer, Roberts stated. But he was nonetheless a piece in progress, and Coach Bill Self set wholesome boundaries.
“He at all times preferred to dribble it,” Roberts stated, “however we weren’t going to let him dribble it.”
As the 2014 NBA draft got here into clearer focus, there have been exceptions. Whenever scouts rolled by way of Kansas’ Allen Fieldhouse, Self would have Embiid head to a basket with a defender in order that he may deal with the ball and “do the Olajuwon stuff” for 5 or 10 minutes.
“He’d do the Dream Shake to perfection,” Roberts stated, referring to Olajuwon’s hallmark spin transfer.
After the 76ers drafted him third general, Embiid missed his first two seasons as a professional with a damaged foot. But these two seasons, in an unintended manner, have been basic to his development, Roberts stated. Limited in what he may do with the workforce, Embiid had loads of time to sharpen his really feel for the recreation — by dribbling.
For his half, Embiid desires to proceed to enhance. Two keys, he stated, are preserving his dribble low and realizing when to choose it up. But he in any other case has the freedom to do what he desires.
“I do not suppose I’m a guard, and I do not suppose I’m a giant,” he stated. “I’m an entire basketball participant.”
Additional work by Andy Chen.