The sagging 76ers need Joel Embiid, but not this Joel Embiid

There’s no reason a sudden, unplanned team meeting has to be a bad thing. Maybe that’s a good thing! Maybe your veteran teammate calls the team meeting right after the end of a road game because he wants to shower someone with some much-deserved attention, or to announce that he just got a great deal on car insurance. You cannot know that until you have attended the meeting. It is best not to burden yourself with anxiety. It’s best to go into the meeting expecting it to be happy and festive.

Kyle Lowry, veteran guard for the Philadelphia 76ers, didn’t get a good car insurance quote recently, or if he did, that’s not why he called Monday’s meeting. The 76ers had just played lethargic and disjointed and had their backside hacked pretty thoroughly by the Miami Heat, their fourth straight loss, bringing their record to a league-worst 2-11. It was Lowry’s impression that the team — which, if healthy and united, should reasonably expect to make another playoff run — needed to clear the air and share “a call to action and urgency,” sources said described it to ESPN’s Shams Charania.

A team never wants to have this particular meeting, certainly not just 13 games into a regular season, but the meeting itself can be productive, even healthy. A few seasons ago, the Boston Celtics had an emotional one player meeting only in the first week of November, amid a poor start, and later that season they took the Golden State Warriors to six games in the NBA Finals. It probably wasn’t the meeting that made their season, but the point is that a good team with a solid culture can have a loaded grievance broadcast in the first quarter of a season without signaling that they are headed for the toilet of dysfunction. And from the sounds of it, Philadelphia’s players and coaches — both groups were in attendance, which is probably a good sign — want pretty much the same thing: Charania says the veteran Sixers would like head coach Nick Nurse to coach them tougher, and Nurse and his assistants want their players to “practice with aim and attention to detail.”

But practicing as you mean it—yes, the 76ers are talking about practice again—will only get a team so far. There’s an elephant in the room, and that’s just a small dig into the current physical state of Philadelphia’s best player. Joel Embiid hasn’t been healthy so far this season, and unlike previous seasons where Embiid has worked his way into shape during October and November, his amazing ability doesn’t come close to making up the difference. In his 30-year-old season, Embiid has appeared in just three games, and he looks really bad, rickety and lost and exhausted. He gives the Sixers only 15 points per game. contest on a dismal 49-percent true shooting, and the team is producing 86 points per when he is on the pitchmore than 21 points worse than when he is off. More than a third of Embiid’s shot attempts so far have come from beyond the arc, not necessarily a terrible statistic in and of itself, except for how it describes Embiid’s troubling state of immobility. On Monday night, Embiid attempted just 11 shots and zero free throws in 31 minutes of action. Playing your way into form is generally only acceptable when it doesn’t mean playing your team out of a competition.

It may not have been Embiid’s alarming condition that inspired the meeting — Lowry et al. probably have other things they’d like to address — but with all due respect to Tyrese Maxey and Paul George, it’s not an exaggeration to say that whatever is left of this title-contending period rests on Embiid’s shoulders. If he can’t get back to dominating, the Sixers are an also-ran at best, even in the deeply crappy East. If he can’t even be a functional part of an average NBA offense, the Sixers may truly be one of the crappiest outfits out there. In news that I’m sure will make Marcus Hayes dance on the graves of entire branches of the Embiid family tree, Embiid’s teammates have noted that he may not be taking the early stages of this season as seriously as he should. Maxey, to his immense credit, reportedly addressed the matter directly:

In the meeting, Maxey challenged Embiid to be on time for team activities, calling out the former league MVP for being late “to everything” and how that affects the locker room, from other players to the coaching staff, sources briefed on the meeting said . ESPN.

Maxey and Embiid have a close friendship and have a history of holding each other accountable, according to those around the team.

Charania reports that Embiid “accepted the messages” delivered in the meeting, but expressed confusion “about what the 76ers are trying to do sometimes on the court.” Since this is a Shams joint, that statement can have multiple meanings, or none at all. If that means Embiid said in the meeting that some of Philadelphia’s sets and actions don’t make sense, that’s both an appropriate thing to bring up in a team meeting of this nature and also an unfortunate thing to address. after your respected teammate has pointed out that you are never around and fucking up team chemistry. If that means Embiid is literally confused out there on the court, that’s going to get a big “no shit” from anyone who’s watched him skulk around ineffectively in the middle of an offense that has lately made the breathtakingly awful Washington Wizards to look like the Harlem Globetrotters. If nothing else, that kind of confusion is the kind of thing that could reasonably be cleared up if Embiid was a more reliable participant in various team functions.

Embiid was listed as questionable with an illness all Monday, and was away from the team enough that some of his teammates apparently assumed he wouldn’t play. That he eventually suited up might have seemed to him a fitting signal of urgency about the importance of any contest, but then he went out and played like crap and his team didn’t benefit at all from his presence. A deflated and deeply joyless Embiid did not want to talk about the meeting at all after it was over, to such an extent that he claimed no knowledge of it has taken place. He chalked up the loss to missed shots and ball security, but felt the team had “one of our better nights” in terms of offensive execution, which is so troubling to say after tallying just 89 points in a loss that one cannot rule out that this was intended as a veiled insult. The 76ers are doing well defensively – ranking 17th in the NBA in defensive rating, per Cleaning the glass– but even there, Embiid doesn’t look like his old all-consuming self:

It’s fun to clown on the 76s, and it’s even more fun to imagine toxic vibes unleashing the ignominious downward spiral that signals the death of all those lofty Process-era dreams that live only in this one player’s alarmingly crabbed corpus. But Embiid, when healthy, is also an impossibly gifted basketball player, and this 76ers roster is, on paper, a very cool team. Even for a shit-hearted idiot like me, it’s kind of sad to think that potential is being snuffed out, not by a surging Orlando Magic (or whatever), but by overburdened skeletons and demoralization. The Sixers need a healthy and engaged Joel Embiid to make much of an impact this NBA season, but Embiid needs reliable bones and ligaments to literally pull off. As crappy as the atmosphere in Philadelphia’s locker room may be, it comes down to this: If Joel Embiid is cooked, so are the 76ers. Practice is important, but we are still only talking about practice.