Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers took a half-beat to evaluate the scenario throughout a late-season recreation towards the Boston Celtics. As is usually the case, he sensed a bonus.
Embiid, a 7-foot, 280-pound middle, cradled the ball close to the highest of the important thing 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’d as effectively have been an act of give up.
Embiid had loads of extraordinary feats in the course of the common season to place himself as a favourite to win his first N.B.A. Most Worthwhile Participant Award. Along with 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.
However there was one factor he did extra typically than anything, an underrated talent for him that destabilized opposing defenses and helped elevate the 76ers to the third-best document within the N.B.A.: He took 5,526 dribbles.
Throughout 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 within the paint, then created area 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, mentioned in the course of 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, N.B.A. facilities made their lunch-pail livings by tenting out close to the ring. A between-the-legs dribble out close to the 3-point line would have most likely landed them on the bench.
However the recreation has modified, after all, and the plodding massive man is a relic. The trendy N.B.A. is teeming with big gamers 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 because the 76ers face the Nets within the first-round of the Jap Convention playoffs. Philadelphia leads the sequence, 2-0, with Recreation 3 on Thursday in Brooklyn.
“I believe he thinks he is a guard,” 76ers capturing guard Tyrese Maxey mentioned of Embiid.
Embiid was not at all times so snug dealing with the ball. As a first-year participant in the course of the 2016-17 season, he averaged simply 0.78 dribbles per contact. In truth, he averaged fewer than one dribble per contact till Doc Rivers was employed because the staff’s coach earlier than the 2020-21 season.
On the time, Rivers mentioned, he heard from followers who needed Embiid to cease drifting to the perimeter. Their argument was that he was too massive and too expert on the basket to be messing round close to the 3-point line. However Rivers mentioned he resisted their pleas to form Embiid into extra of an old-school middle.
“Everyone was saying: ‘Get him on the put up! Get him on the put up!’ ” Rivers recalled in an interview. “However it is a man who can deliver 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 you understand what? Let him do it.”
Final season, Embiid averaged 1.41 dribbles per contact, which ranked second amongst facilities behind Bam Adebayo of the Miami Warmth. This season, Embiid averaged 1.18 dribbles per contact — one other sturdy whole that once more positioned him among the many league’s most dribble-prone massive males. He averaged practically 84 dribbles per recreation, in accordance with N.B.A. Superior Stats, a division on the league workplace that produces metrics based mostly on participant monitoring information.
“I imagine I can do something on the basketball flooring,” Embiid mentioned. “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 staff’s place to begin guard.
“James,” Embiid mentioned, “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 massive males wish to be guards,” 76ers ahead P.J. Tucker mentioned. “Why? As a result of being a guard is cooler. Who desires to hang around within the paint and simply take hook pictures?”
Alongside these strains, Maxey acknowledged that he typically will get nervous when Embiid grabs a defensive rebound and insists on dribbling upcourt himself.
“However on the finish of the day, he’s Joel Embiid for a purpose,” Maxey mentioned. “There’s solely one in all him.”
Within the halfcourt, the calculus for defenders is unforgiving. Embiid is proficient sufficient as an outdoor 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 when they overextend by urgent up towards him, Embiid is able to dribbling by them.
“Bigs? They haven’t any shot,” Tucker mentioned. “I imply, they will’t guard him anyplace.”
And if opponents attempt to entice him, Embiid will discover the open man.
“For him to do the stuff that he does at his dimension is ridiculous,” mentioned Norm Roberts, who coached Embiid as an assistant at Kansas.
Throughout Embiid’s lone school season, Roberts envisioned him creating right into a “Tim Duncan-type man,” an early signal of Embiid’s excessive ceiling. Throughout Duncan’s Corridor 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 across the basket by sealing defenders and utilizing a smorgasbord of put up strikes.
The problem for the teaching employees 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.
Rising 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 enjoying highschool basketball in Florida.
A few of Embiid’s earliest classes got here by way of YouTube. Along with learning footage of Hakeem Olajuwon, who was one of many 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.
“These are the blokes I’ve at all times been extra drawn to,” Embiid mentioned. “They’re clearly approach smaller than me, and I can’t transfer in addition to they do. However I like watching the way in which they transfer, how briskly they’re, and I nonetheless do. That’s how I be taught, and that’s how I attempt to add to my recreation.”
He added: “If you have a look at the perfect ballhandlers, it’s not essentially about dribbling. It’s all about footwork. That you must have good footwork.”
At Kansas, Embiid had good footwork — the years he had spent enjoying soccer have been a giant assist — together with terrific palms and nice imaginative and prescient as a passer, Roberts mentioned. However he was nonetheless a piece in progress, and Coach Invoice Self set wholesome boundaries.
“He at all times preferred to dribble it,” Roberts mentioned, “however we weren’t going to let him dribble it.”
Because the 2014 N.B.A. draft got here into clearer focus, there have been exceptions. At any time when 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 mentioned, 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. However these two seasons, in an unintentional approach, have been basic to his development, Roberts mentioned. Restricted in what he may do with the staff, Embiid had loads of time to sharpen his really feel for the sport — by dribbling.
For his half, Embiid desires to proceed to enhance. Two keys, he mentioned, are holding his dribble low and understanding when to choose it up. However he in any other case has the liberty to do what he desires.
“I don’t suppose I’m a guard, and I don’t suppose I’m a giant,” he mentioned. “I’m an entire basketball participant.”
Extra work by Andy Chen.