Sixers

There’s an Obvious Explanation for Why Joel Embiid isn’t Getting a Ton of Local Attention

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Dec 22nd, 2023 · 10:39 AM EST

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Someone in our Slack channel posited the theory that Joel Embiid is getting more national love than local love this season. I don’t have any hard data to back that up, but would agree with it. Embiid is the current MVP favorite and is absolutely tearing it up with a new partner in Tyrese Maxey and a new head coach in Nick Nurse. He’s averaging per-36 career highs across the board and is playing some of the best basketball we’ve ever seen in Philadelphia. He may been in the middle of the best singular season that any Philly athlete has had in any sport over the past 50 years.

Why aren’t more people talking about this?

Three reasons, I think:

1. It’s Eagles season.
2. We’ve watched Joel do this for years now.
3. He was 5 for 18 and a -24 in Game 7 against Boston last year.

Really simple. It’s football season. People won’t shift focus to the Sixers until the Birds are done. And the Phillies’ playoff run took away early-season eyeballs as well. Nobody was focused on basketball in the fall, especially with most people predicting a down year following the James Harden saga. Sixers fatigue was a very real thing.

Two, this is not surprising. Everybody here knows that Embiid is a beast, the best Philadelphia basketball player in many years. It’s nothing new to us, but the fact that he’s doing it night in and night out, with these outrageous 40+ point games, has seemed to push him into more of the national focus, whereas maybe that wasn’t the case in seasons past, outside of the incessant and feckless arguing about whether or not Nikola Jokic is the better player.

The third reason is the most obvious. Embiid has the reputation of being a playoff underachiever. Injuries being what they are, he was horrendous in Game 7 against Boston earlier this calendar year. He shot .278 from the floor, only got to the foul line six times, and quit like everybody else on that team quit. Even in Game 6, when the Sixers had a chance to close out the Celtics at home, he only shot the ball once in the game’s final five minutes and was mostly a bystander while Jayson Tatum went nuclear and his teammates fired up bricks.

That’s all it is. Embiid is the best basketball player this city has seen in a very long time. Maybe the best overall athlete, too, considering the things he does on the court at his height and weight. He is much more than a foul merchant, as anybody who actually watches the games can discern. But past playoff failures have done irreparable damage to a portion of fans and media who only have a finite amount of regular season love to give to Embiid.