76ciology wrote:In my view, Joel Embiid is a product of today's player development-focused environment. His transformation from a project to an MVP under Drew Hanlen's guidance is remarkable. However, to become a true winner, you need to play many real 5-on-5 cerebral games to experience various schemes. This is how Doncic developed into a savant at a young age. The same can be said for Giannis and Jokic, who play a lot of international games in the offseason. What does Embiid do? He plays 1-on-1 against small trainers, emulating moves from YouTube.
Zach LaVine is a prime example of this issue. He is a very talented player, but he didn't develop his basketball IQ. He knows different ways to get 50pts from various moves taught by Drew Hanlen but he doesn't know how to win.
With Embiid, he doesn't know how to pace himself. He always goes hard against weak teams and in early games. Embiid also knows how to operate when the scheme is vanilla. When the refs stop calling fouls, he still tries to foul bait in crunch time. You can say he should stop doing so, but what makes you think he knows how to be an elite scorer without foul baiting?
What if the main reason he's hard to defend is that defenders are trying not to foul him? This could explain why he gets most of his scoring early in the game.
Look at Jokic—he's okay with looking foolish in the regular season. He understands that you can have all the spotlight you want, but the real prize is in the playoffs, and that's what he's saving himself for. Jokic also has much more in-game experience, which is why he is often a step ahead of his opponents. He can punish the defense if they play physical, if the refs arent blowing their whistle, if the spacing is bad or if the defense is throwing multiple defenders. And you get all these conditions with these FIBA tournaments.
What's worse is that Embiid misses a lot of regular season games, further limiting his already very vanilla regular season on-court experience compared to other top players.
In that Drew Hanlen podcast with Joel Embiid, you can get a glimpse into his mindset. He focuses heavily on 1v1 play and the development of his game. He takes an entire year to see what needs changing, but this could be achieved way earlier if he’s playing in the pro league like Doncic as a teenager of he’s playing in international games every offseason like Jokic.
As a result, every year we face a problem that surprises us in the playoffs, which we then try to address in the offseason, like rebounding last year. These issues could have been identified much earlier if Embiid's game experience was like that of other professional athletes his age, with hundreds or even thousands more high-intensity games played.
It's beyond wishful thinking to believe that Embiid is going to change with regard to how he approaches the game at this stage. If that was going to happen, it would have several years ago after one of the playoff disappointments. We will perhaps see a new offensive move wrinkle he worked on with Hanlon, but all the other 5v5 flaws will remain. It's kind of foolish to believe otherwise.
That video spoke volumes, moaning about lack of support over the years and ripping a guy who just won a championship, as if it's all about 1v1, as you say. Embiid surrounds himself with sycophants who only reinforce this mentality, which is a huge part of the problem. If a strong coaching hire had been made to replace Brown it might have made a difference, perhaps if a guy like Nurse had gotten Embiid a few years younger, but instead it was three years of Glenn catering to this Embiid mindset.
It will be very interesting to see the team dynamic with a legit scoring option in George added, whether Embiid intelligently uses this as a chance to pace himself offensively during games and focus on the defensive end or if he feels slighted that he might not be option 1 or 2 in big spots.
I would be thrilled to be wrong and see him as an improved passer and end of clock safety valve offensively who hammers the offensive boards, and a DPOY type player on the other end. I'm not holding my breath.
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