Perk gets the first word this morning:

He’s talking about Embiid’s selection to the All-NBA second team, which is a big fat fuckin’ joke. You know it and I know it. Even the 250 Ringer employees with votes know it, but we ended up with a grouping like this despite Joel being eligible at both the center and forward positions:

  • First Team: Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Luka Doncic, Devin Booker, Jayson Tatum
  • Second Team: Embiid, Ja Morant, Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, DeMar DeRozan
  • Third Team: Karl-Anthony Towns, LeBron, Chris Paul, Trae Young, Pascal Siakam

Embiid was the scoring champion and MVP runner up, with a strong case to win the award. He broke his face in the playoffs thanks to a cheap shot and had to play most of the year through the Ben Simmons holdout horseshit. The fact that this man will finish second team All-NBA after the season he had is nothing short of an atrocity:

They hate the process!

The funny thing is that Embiid actually got more voting points total that one of the guys who wound up on the first team, which you can see here in this graphic provided by the NBA:

414 points for Embiid and 390 for Tatum, yet Tatum goes to first team because he got more forward votes. Looks like 12 center votes and then 45 at forward for Embiid.

Anyway, in no way was Joel not one of the top five NBA players this season, and that’s the problem with the system. This would have likewise been pitiful if Jokic was second team and Joel was first. You could really make a case that Embiid, Jokic, and Giannis all belong in that group, and if that’s the case, throw out the positional restrictions and just give the honor to the best players. Some years three bigs might on the 1st team and some years you might have four guards and a wing. It is what it is! Let’s use common sense here instead of going square peg/round hole and leaving deserving players on the outside, looking in. These guys play their asses off and the awarding process should be honed to the best of our ability.