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It’s Painful to Watch Joel Embiid Get Austin Reaves 1v1 and Settle for a Turnaround Fadeaway
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The Sixers’ three-game winning streak came to an end with a home loss to the Lakers on Sunday night, final score 112 to 108. Joel Embiid finished 4-21 from the floor, 0-6 from three, and this sequence towards the end of the game got some buzz on social media. It was 108-105 Lakers at the time and he settled for a turnaround fadeaway with a 6’5″ shooting guard on him:
Worse-case scenario he’s at the foul line, whether Luka comes over to help or not. I’m guessing Embiid took that shot because his previous field goal was a foul-line pullup that he knocked down to tie the game at 105. That, or he just doesn’t have the juice in his legs to back down a smaller guy and just finish over and/or through him. MVP Embiid would have gone to the rack there, or at least turned and faced before firing off that mid-range jumper that seemingly always went in.
Embiid played 30 minutes in this game. He’s been coming in and out. Maybe it’s hard to establish a rhythm and find some consistency, but in this game he had two buckets at the rim and two eight-footers. One of the former was a touch at the nail in which he took Rui Hachimura right to the rack for a finger roll layup and the other was a rebound and a tap-in. It felt like there were at least a half-dozen (or more) midrange pull ups that rimmed out and just wouldn’t fall, so maybe just a bit of bad luck there.
However you slice it, Embiid’s shooting splits are underwhelming across the board. This year he’s below league average from three, above league average in some mid-range quadrants on the right, and then sitting right around league average at the rim:
Going back to his MVP season, he was league average or better in every spot on the floor expect for the left corner/baseline, right corner/baseline, and left side mid-break, which only accounted for 80 of his 728 field goals anyway. Look at the difference:
Funny enough, Embiid finished +11 on the night. He grabbed seven rebounds, threw two assists, only committed one foul, and shot 8/8 from the line. He had some good moments in rim protection. He’s still creating space for the guards and opening up the floor for them. Good screens and DHO work, so he’s not a net zero out there, but it seems pretty obvious that he can’t be the offensive focal point anymore. How can he be when this is what his knees are at age 31 anyway? It feels silly on the surface to relegate a former MVP and $50-million player to a sidebar role, but he’s still doing those things well and maybe that’s the ceiling for Joel at this point in his career, or at this point in the season. The knees aren’t getting better, right? Nobody believes that.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com