Post#35 » by lessthanjake » Thu May 9, 2024 1:36 am
Maybe. But I’d still have a lot of concerns. A few of them, in no particular order:
1. He plays a style of basketball that focuses a lot on high FT volume, and that is a style of play that historically doesn’t translate well in the playoffs, where FTs aren’t called as easily. Embiid is also just a giant human being that, even leaving aside injury/health issues, is never going to have huge stamina. That becomes a bigger deal in the playoffs, when the intensity gets higher, the game gets more tiring, and superstar minutes go up. So I think our baseline assumption should be that Embiid would always be a playoff dropper to a somewhat significant degree. Of course, perhaps a healthy Embiid would be such a great regular season player that even dropping in the playoffs would leave him incredibly good, but this does give me pause.
2. It’s not actually completely clear to me that Embiid would get all the foul calls he get if he were healthy. IMO, refs do give an easy whistle to Joel in general, compared to what a lot of other huge and dominant big men have gotten. I do think there’s an element of that that is the league trying to protect Joel from injury—he’s a major star and it’s better for the NBA if he’s healthy, so there’s reason for them to try to disincentivize rough and physical play with Embiid. If he were a healthy player in general, I think he’d lose that kid-glove treatment and probably get called like most healthy dominant big men (i.e. they’re allowed to be mauled a lot without fouls), which would likely somewhat mitigate the positive effect of being healthy. I will note that this issue actually overlaps with point #1 above, in that if a healthy Embiid got less foul calls then he’d also be less reliant on foul calls and therefore less likely to be a playoff dropper.
3. I have concerns about Embiid’s mentality. We don’t have a complete window into someone, nor are we around them all the time, so I say this with a real grain of salt. But Embiid seems very quick to feel sorry for himself and to make excuses. I don’t think that’s the ideal mentality for a player to overcome adversity (which will always come in some way) or to lead others. Of course, some of feeling sorry for himself is precisely because of all the injuries, which must be genuinely extremely frustrating. But I think there’s more to it than that. And I do feel like some of this is having his NBA upbringing be on a team that was actively trying to lose for the first several years he was there. It was an organization that did not incentivize people to be accountable and, quite the opposite, basically wanted any excuse to have players not play or not play hard. I don’t think that helped Embiid’s mentality as a player, and I think he’d probably have a better mentality now if he’d been drafted by a different organization.
4. As with any player with perpetual health issues, we do have to ask ourselves whether the things that make him great are also in part the things that give him health issues. Like, Embiid is a massive human being. His size and power is a huge part of what makes him such a good player. But players of his size are also often very injury-prone because there’s just a lot of weight being put on various parts of their bodies (knees, feet, etc.). Could someone have all the things about Embiid physically that makes him great, without having there be health issues? If we are positing an Embiid with no health issues, does that mean we’re also toning down his size or something in order to take those health issues away? And, if so, how much less good does that make him?
Ultimately, though, these aren’t necessarily dispositive concerns. Maybe it is possible to have the good parts of Embiid’s body while being totally healthy. And if Embiid were a totally healthy player, maybe he would get less foul calls and be a bit of a playoff dropper, but also just be so great that that wouldn’t stop him from having huge team success in the playoffs. And maybe without injuries and with team success, he’d have developed a totally different mentality. In that case, I think the talent is there for him to have potentially been the best player of his generation.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.