This isn’t a shock. For the second consecutive year, Joel Embiid is named to the NBA’s All-Defensive Second Team:

Congrats to @JoelEmbiid on being named @NBA All-Defensive Second Team! #HereTheyCome pic.twitter.com/5RuwqGSbeM

— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) May 22, 2019

It was expected that Embiid would make the second team after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert was named as one of the three finalists for Defensive Player of the Year along with Giannis Antetokounmpo and Paul George. Embiid netted just four first team votes and led all players with 72 second team votes.

Here’s a full breakdown of the All-Defensive First and Second Teams, after the jump:

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Brett Brown spoke at length pregame yesterday about Joel Embiid’s left knee soreness and what he describes as a non-correlation to the center’s All-Star Game participation.

I don’t think he wanted to speak at length, but he knows, and we all know, that the status of the Sixers’ best and most important player is topic #1 always and forever.

Brown reiterated that the Sixers knew about the soreness prior to the All-Star weekend, but doubled-down in rebuffing the notion that Embiid’s 23 minutes in Charlotte were detrimental to his near-term Sixers availability.

After the jump, a full transcript of his Thursday evening comments, which began off the top with Jon Johnson, the local radio host, not the Los Angeles Ram:

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I’m back.

Kinker has returned from England/Scotland/Ireland/Wales, and while all of those countries were fantastic, nothing compares to the blue collar, lunch-pail carrying, workmanlike city of Philadelphia.

Anyway, Ben Simmons won Rookie of the Year last night. Good for him; he deserved it. The voting wasn’t even close, which surprised me. I thought for sure Donovan Mitchell would have received more first place nods, but I was wrong.

Joel Embiid finished second in Defensive Player of the Year voting, which I do think is fair. Rudy Gobert was fantastic this season, even if he did miss a significant chunk of time through injury. Did he feed on tanking teams during the second half of the year? Maybe, but I think the same could be said of Embiid when the Sixers were trouncing mediocre Eastern Conference squads before he suffered the facial fracture in March. Joel ended up playing 63 games while Gobert featured in 56, so the difference was ultimately negligible, in my mind. Utah was a juggernaut when Gobert returned, going 30-7 over a stretch that began in January and carried into April. The Sixers, of course, won 16 straight to finish the year, a run that included Embiid for about half of that time.

A quick look at the per-36 numbers for each player:

Gobert had better block and steal numbers while committing fewer fouls.

Advanced numbers show he also out-performed Joel in defensive box plus/minus and defensive win shares:

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It went from bad to worse last night when Joel Embiid’s precautionary testing revealed an orbital fracture and concussion, suffered Wednesday in a second-quarter collision with Markelle Fultz.

The Sixers’ big man is expected to miss two to four weeks of actions, according to ESPN, and would likely return for the start of the playoffs or midway through round one. He has yet to undergo surgery.

Until then, the Sixers will play eight more regular season games without him, a schedule that includes just two playoff teams and six non-playoff teams, with four on the road and four at home. It is not, thankfully, murderer’s row, and this roster is good enough to beat the likes of Atlanta and Dallas sans Joel in a continued push for home court advantage.

For what it’s worth, the Sixers are 3-8 without Embiid this season, but five of those losses came on the second night of a back-to-back, long before Joel was cleared to play in those games. In full context, not only are you missing your best player, but you’re traveling and tired, so I don’t know how much those back-to-back losses can be blamed on Embiid’s absence and how much can be blamed on weariness in general.

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