Joel Embiid and the Burden of Dominance

"For me, for the most part, I was healthy," Joel Embiid told reporters at the podium after the Philadelphia 76ers' 118-115 loss to the New York Knicks in a series-ending Game 6. Mid-sentence, Embiid let loose a smirk that dragged into an exasperated laugh, his eyes on the verge of rolling. Perhaps I am healthy was part of the affirmative self-talk that he had used as a mantra throughout the wildly competitive first-round series. And perhaps, in a way, it worked: This was the best six-game postseason stretch of his career. But with his Sixers once again falling well short of expectations with yet another early exit, the laugh was a sort of relinquishing. Like he didn't have to lie to himself anymore.

Yet there were moments—and there always are—on Thursday that defied logic and sensibility in the way that Embiid so often does. Moments astonishing enough to have you believing that maybe health is purely a state of mind that can override the mechanics of an ailing body. And in those bursts of pure athletic brilliance, there is nothing to do but hold your breath. (Sixers fans have been asphyxiated for damn-near a full decade.) I found myself yelping "Oh, God" early in the second quarter, as the Sixers were mounting their comeback from an early 22-point deficit. OG Anunoby had a downhill straight-line drive for a layup that was, in an instant, erased by Embiid on the weak-side recovery. Anunoby and Embiid collapsed onto the hardwood in almost synchronous fashion. Every fall feels like the one that could change everything. Every play feels like a miracle.

I try my best to mentally take a step back when watching Embiid, who, perhaps more than any other player in the NBA, is besieged by the past. He's weathered countless fits and starts, both with his own physical rehabilitation and as part of a franchise that has experienced some of the strangest turnovers in personnel that the league has ever seen. He is one of the most physically imposing players in history; he is also one of the most talented. And he has yet to make it past the second round of the playoffs. The clock is ticking.

There is no language that conveys the burden, both physical and psychological, Embiid faces on a nightly basis as clearly as the one he expresses with his own body. Whether it reveals itself in hobbled steps or absolute dominance, it's there. Every hard-planting Eurostep, every force-displacing tumble onto the hardwood, every left-footed leap reanimates the specters of what could have been a lost future. As Embiid enters the offseason and readies his body for his Olympic basketball debut with Team USA, he'll also be coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the stress fracture in the navicular bone of his right foot—the injury (and reinjury a year later) that cost him all of what should have been the first two seasons of his career. Inarguably one of the most consequential injuries in modern NBA history.

Over the course of Embiid's eight seasons playing in the league, he's found a unique sense of balance in the way his body loads for a jump shot. A compensation that has become something more. Embiid typically leaps off his left foot and lands on that same left foot first. All the while, his right foot swings gently along the vertical axis, rocking weightlessly as if it were a phantom limb, before touching back down on the court. Visually, it gives the impression of a fadeaway—Embiid's contribution to the iconic basketball artform that traces all the way back to the days of Wilt Chamberlain. "Style is, in a way, one of the objects of athletics in general: an ever-evolving understanding of one's dimensions and how they behave in space," I wrote back in February. "Style reveals itself over time. That isn't to say one's style is always beautiful, but it is, for the moment, honest." For Embiid, it's been a fruitful adaptation that nonetheless presents a vestige. Even an MVP award and a thoroughly dominant statistical profile can't completely erase the fragile origin point of his NBA career that continues to haunt him—one that reveals itself anew with every jump shot.

The orthopedic surgeon Riley Williams—the team physician for both the Brooklyn Nets and Team USA basketball—once described the navicular bone in the foot as the brick at the very top of a bridge. "So imagine if you were to straighten that arch out, the force pushing against that upper-most brick in the arch," Williams said. "The rest of the bricks start to fall to the middle as the arch collapses. It's that same type of analogy with the foot. The navicular sits at the top of the arch, and as you lose competency in the arch, there are more forces from both the heel and the fore-foot all squeezing on those mid-foot bones." He was communicating the severity of the injury with regard to Yao Ming back in 2009, whose navicular fracture (and refracture) led to his untimely retirement only eight seasons into his career—to this day, Yao can't feel the top of his left foot. A navicular fracture was what ended Bill Walton's career twice—once in 1981, at just 28 years old; again in 1987. Embiid had to experience this same career-threatening injury before playing in a single NBA game. There is something brutally Yeatsian in Williams's analogy, in this one little bone capable of toppling giants: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.

To Embiid's credit, in part because of the adjustments he's made to his on-court habitus, he's never missed time specifically due to any right foot issues. But overcompensation invariably leads to other issues down the road. Shaquille O'Neal, the only other player in league history who can relate to Embiid's specific confluence of dominance and structural disorder, knows all too well how the mechanisms of a massive body can derail in an instant. "Everything was traced back to my stupid arthritic toe," Shaq lamented in his 2011 memoir. "Because the toe wouldn't bend, I was jumping off the ball of my foot. It changed my gait and the way I jumped, and it put a tremendous strain on the rest of my leg. It was kind of a chain reaction."

Embiid's left foot has become his predominant lever of force, and given how effective his tectonic and methodical Eurostep can be, it's clearly an effective one. But the contact he invites also leaves him prone to precarious situations. He has dealt with left knee issues that have forced him to miss significant time in three different seasons dating back to 2019, including the one that just ended. What happens when Embiid can't trust either of his legs to push off? Actually, we know what happens. We just witnessed it. On one fully functioning leg, Embiid averaged 33 points, 10.8 rebounds, 5.7 assists, 1.2 steals, and 1.5 blocks per game in the series against the Knicks. It wasn't perfect, but it was legitimately everything he had to give. Moments of irrepressibility quelled only by fatigue: Embiid averaged 41.3 minutes in the first round, by far the most minutes he's played in any six-game stretch of his career. "As long as I can play and jump even a little bit and I can be on the floor, I feel like my presence is enough. Even if I can't jump and I can't move the way I want to, or if my body's not responding the way it should be—but I just love to play," Embiid said after Game 6.

Therein lies the conundrum that Embiid faces. Given his risk profile, one would expect both Embiid and the Sixers to figure out ways to parcel out his time on the floor. Easier said than done. He can't afford to miss a minute, because there is a sense that he's playing on borrowed time—and that the Sixers have only so long to maximize a dwindling peak. Embiid has had one of the best plus-minus figures since entering the league, and the Sixers have managed to muster a positive net rating in non-Embiid minutes in just two of his eight seasons. And even then it was essentially a mirage: In those two seasons, they managed to outscore opponents by a tenth of a point per 100 possessions in non-Embiid minutes. The team has always been constructed around complementing an Embiid playing at the peak of his abilities, because there is no realistic contingency for a player with that kind of outsized impact on the game on both ends of the floor. Back in the Peyton Manning era of the Indianapolis Colts, the team's offensive coordinator, Tom Moore, was asked why the backup quarterbacks never got any of the reps in practice. "Fellas, if '18' goes down, we're fucked," Moore said. "And we don't practice fucked."

We're not talking about practice, but the point stands. For better or for worse, it's all on Embiid. And every year, the burden grows heavier.

They compare Embiid to Shaq the way they used to compare Shaq to Wilt. "He's our generation and our version of Shaq," Paul George said on his podcast. "What Joel Embiid is doing is just pure dominance," Kevin Garnett said on his. "Watching him, this is what Shaq would have looked like with a jump shot."

Embiid's 70-point game earlier this year, which broke a Sixers single-game franchise scoring record previously set by Chamberlain in 1967, brought him closer to joining a very specific fraternity of two. Wilt and Shaq, the two most dominant players in NBA history, recited often enough to be a truism. "To be in that class is great, but it doesn't really mean anything until you win the whole thing," Embiid said after the 70-point game. "I think the whole conversation changes about what people see about you. That's what I'm working towards." Chamberlain and Shaq both won their first championship in their eighth season; Embiid's eighth season just ended in the first round.

Dominance is an interesting concept, in and out of the scope of NBA history. It suggests an objective reality despite drawing more of its mystique from visceral experience—the stuff of tall tales. Placed in the hands of Wilt and Shaq, dominance seems every bit about the long shadow of their potential as it does their actual ability to lord over the rim on both ends of the floor. Wilt and Shaq both carried their respective stigmas: Wilt was seen as a perennial loser; Shaq was seen as lazy. There is something backhanded in the nature of the most dominant debate as it pertains to the NBA—it's a consolation of sorts. It's something that Chamberlain himself picked up on with Shaq's arrival.

"When people make these comparisons, they say I should be honored to be held up as the definition of the apex of a big man," Chamberlain said in 1992 at the start of Shaq's NBA career. "But if that's the highest accolade, how come when they talk about who the best big man of all time is, they throw four or five other names in there?"

Because "dominance" is often cast as something separate from "best." Dominance demands a rollicking intensity of highs and lows to maintain its evocative fervor; best is more steadfast, a model of consistency, a perfect foil. Wilt had Bill Russell. Shaq had Hakeem Olajuwon, then Tim Duncan. Embiid has Nikola Jokic. It's a dynamic push-and-pull that was not lost on either Wilt or Shaq, who found ways to move the goalposts for their self-preservation. For Wilt, it was willfully changing his identity as a "selfish" player, just to make a point that he could. "I've always been the kind of person who needs specific, concrete goals and challenges," Chamberlain wrote in his 1991 autobiography. "So I decided I'd lead the NBA in assists. I probably got more satisfaction out of winning that title than almost any other."

For Shaq, it was reorienting what was important to him entirely. "When you talk about the most dominant, it's only two in all these eras: Wilt Chamberlain and Shaquille O'Neal," Shaq said in his 2022 HBO documentary series. "That's what people don't understand about me. I don't want to be the best. Forget all that best. I want you to fear me. I want you to be scared. I want you to be so scared that you go to the commissioner and you get the rules changed."

But for all of Embiid's similarities to his spiritual antecedents, his ambitions lie in a different realm. His earliest dreams living in Yaoundé, Cameroon, were about playing on a football pitch as a central midfielder. "I kind of found myself in the midfield, because I like to control," Embiid said earlier this year. "I like to be a maestro, make the passes and just control the whole game." His towering stature became a curse that separated him from his first love, but his self-perception as a creator never shifted. So he walked the path of Olajuwon, incorporating the dexterity, coordination, and spatial awareness from his other sports to infuse a unique approach to basketball for his size. But in his heart of hearts, he identifies as a guard. He wants to be Jordan. He wants to be Kobe. "They're obviously way smaller than me, and I can't move as well as they do. But I love watching the way they move, how fast they are, and I still do," Embiid told The New York Times last year. "That's how I learn, and that's how I try to add to my game."

Luckily, he's playing in an era that allows him to chase that ideal, and that freedom has led to scoring titles and an MVP award. But Embiid is pressing up against the physical limits of his frame and what it can withstand, operating at a velocity that has left him in shambles when the team needs him most. He's proved too vital to keep off the floor; his body has proved too encumbered to stay on it. There is a certain dominance present in this state of being—of extracting miracles from a faulty vessel, in spite of everything. Something tells me that gives Embiid no solace.

Because there's something perverse about dominance, isn't there? When Embiid scored 70 points in late January, after the game, all he could think about were the easy baskets that he'd blown and the extra minutes that he could have played. Before Shaq was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he lamented all the points he'd left on the table in his prime. "I had a lot of freak injuries—had knee surgeries, toe injuries and my hand broken twice from hard fouls," Shaq told Shams Charania in 2016. "You miss near 200 games, averaging 25 points, that's 5,000 points right there to add. That hurts me." His goal was always to supplant Wilt on the all-time scoring list, to assert himself definitively as the most dominant—a superlative that bears no concrete definition.

Embiid's trajectory falls into a similar ambiguity. Is a championship the ultimate goal for him, and if so, is there a way to adapt to a different state of mind? Maybe it was just putting on a brave face, but Embiid expressed some excitement for the future. For the first time in a long time, he will enter a full second season with a costar in Tyrese Maxey that he is on the same page with. He likely will be rid of Tobias Harris, the third star that never, ever was. Daryl Morey will have the latitude to build the team back up—so long as his franchise center does the same for himself, for as long as he wishes to remain in town. As Embiid faces another long summer, I can't help but wonder how we'll remember him once his playing days are over—maybe not so different than how he is viewed today. In defeat, Embiid walked out of the Wells Fargo Arena a literal living legend: an age-old parable of dominance and its unbearable weight, one that proves, yet again, too good to be true.