In each of the prior two seasons, Joel Embiid finished second in MVP voting to Nikola Jokic. Then, in 2023, he became the most recent recipient of the NBA’s loudest individual trophy, and completed the pyrrhic saga that has been his voluminous public yearning for the award.
No one, save for maybe Karl Malone, has ever won this honor while also taking such a deep reputational hit. After six straight seasons of failing to reach the conference finals, Embiid and the Philadelphia 76ers are falling out of conversations about title contention—they have been rightly typecast as mid-playoff fodder, too prone to inexplicable erosions of poise to take seriously.
This stinky team trait was long-cited as the result of Ben Simmons being the Sixers’ main ball-handler, but Simmons has now been around for only half of these collapses, and arguably less than that depending on how you characterize their loss to the Toronto Raptors in 2019 (it was, in many eyes, a much more honorable affair than what we’ve come to expect from Philly). Aside from the organization itself, Embiid himself is the only common denominator in these annual collapses. In almost every postseason he’s played, he’s been an inefficient volume scorer, and in all of them, he’s averaged more turnovers than assists.
With the MVP now behind him and the chronically injury-plagued Embiid set to turn 30 before his next playoffs, plenty are wondering whether we’ve already seen his path of glory extend as far as it ever will. The James Harden situation isn’t helping: after playing about 100 games for the Sixers, Harden is now requesting a trade for the third time in as many years, sandwiching the Philadelphia front office snugly between a boulder and a big steel beam. Harden’s play has been in a gradual decline; his interpersonal reliability, a steep one. And on just a one-year deal after opting into a small contract extension—potentially out of spite—his trade value is especially dubious.
The Sixers’ stance on Harden’s worth, in discussions with trade suitors, is reportedly “unreasonable,” suggesting a prolonged transactional stalemate, a probably sour third Harden season in Philly, or both. None of it bodes well for Embiid, whose unusual size-kinesis combo is likely to expire more quickly than other star players’ primes do, particularly given his extensive injury history. Over his career, he has averaged just 44 games played per season. He has no time to waste, but is employed by a team with poor prospects for making the most out of the next few years. Embiid, like me and you, knows this, and has now spoken cryptically about his predicament—”I just want to win a championship, whatever it takes,” he said in a recent interview. “I don’t know where that’s going to be, whether it’s in Philly or anywhere else.”
It’s not all doom and poop for Embiid and the Sixers, though. The big man is an extraordinary enough talent that, if he can ever peak in the spring instead of winter, the team can break free from the underwhelming second-round purgatory that they’ve come to know. Medical science suggests that this is only possible if Embiid spends more of the regular season chilling in a restorative crisper, as opposed to monomaniacally chasing the dazzle of a one-man trophy that doesn’t score any points for you in postseason contests. Now that he possesses said trophy, it’s perhaps the case that Embiid is ready to manage his exertion more wisely. If he were to ever enter May with full batteries, he would inspire nightmares for all possible opponents, regardless of whatever else is going on with the Sixers.
That scenario remains a fantasy until it actually happens, though. Like with all his peers—contemporary and historic—in the hyper-coordinated Bigfoot category, any amount of Embiid’s success is improbable for how much it defies existing data sets on the physics of human biology. If he never played another great game again, his career would remain an incredible thing, a display of the unlikely so gobsmacking that his highlight reel can make any non-fan lean in for one brilliant moment. There’s a whole lot that needs to happen in Philly for that magic to be less fleeting, and for it to cohere with the hero’s journey narrative that NBA fans—and, it would seem, Joel Embiid himself—are so unforgiving about seeing.
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