The beautiful nihilism of Joel Embiid
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Today, we’re going to talk about how working for a billionaire who’s full of shit has a tendency to induce feelings of “nothing matters lol,” and also explore the possibility that “advanced analytics” are themselves another lie that billionaires who are full of shit tell.
Make sure to read all the way to the end for the Media Events Signature Content Module™, “A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar.”
When it comes to living in Philadelphia, there are a few things that will always be true: You will curse the Philadelphia Parking Authority as a corrupt cartel at least once a year, the cheese you buy at the Acme on Passyunk and Reed will go bad the second you purchase it, your friendliest neighbor is definitely a Trump supporter, and Harris-Blitzer Sports & Entertainment — the company “spun up” by private equity ghouls Josh Harris and David Blitzer to consolidate their various ownership stakes in professional sports franchises, including and especially the Philadelphia 76ers — is constantly lying to you all of the time.
The organization, as it pertains to the Sixers, is biologically incapable of not doing sketchy shit. They have no reason to, other than perhaps that it is slightly more convenient to do so in the moment, and through a combination of money, power, and trust in the local media’s collective goldfish brain, there will be no consequences for doing so. In the past couple of seasons, its track record of obfuscation, evasion, and mendacity includes, but is by no means limited to:
- Never satisfactorily providing an explanation for how Kelly Oubre got hit by a car in Center City last year, declining to respond to the weird rumors being spread by cop-affiliated social media accounts by being like “Hey our player was clearly the victim of a hit-and-run, why don’t you guys do your jobs and find out who did it,” and instead waiting a few weeks and pretending the entire imbroglio never occurred.
- Whining to the city government about needing a new arena for the team, threatening to take the team to Camden unless the city let them build said new arena in the middle of Chinatown, and then somehow convincing the city to let them do it even though literally everyone who did not have an ownership stake in the Sixers hated the plan.
- Being super vague about the nature of the knee injury that Joel Embiid suffered last season, then being even more vague about his recovery timeline.
- Acting like the bone bruise that Paul George suffered in the preseason is a super-minor thing and that he’ll be back any day now, despite the fact that Robert Covington missed nearly the entirety of last season because of the exact same injury.
- Acting like Joel Embiid was going to play in the nationally televised season opener, only to sit him without explanation, prompting an investigation from the league, and then proceeding to sit him for the first four games of the season.
As a super-minor “oh shit what else they aren’t telling us,” the team’s promo graphic for its game against the Pistons featured Tyrese Maxey, Kelly Oubre, and Caleb Martin instead of its star trio of Maxey, Embiid, and George, which probably means nothing but has a perhaps 17 percent chance of meaning that George and Embiid are going to be sidelined long enough that it was worth hassling the graphics person to make some new promo materials.
To be clear, these are just the things from the past calendar year which I could think of off the top of my head.
It would be understandable that, after a career’s worth of bearing witness to such shadiness, especially such a tenure with such incidents as, oh, I don’t know, *deep breath* a number-one draft pick forgetting how to shoot; another another number-one draft pick becoming afraid of dunking, let alone shooting; Jimmy Butler skipping town; your organization’s capitulation to both Doc Rivers and Tobias Harris; an entire news cycle dedicated to your G.M.’s collar sizes; your then-teammates James Harden and P.J. Tucker skipping your wedding to be really sweaty at a club and steal burgers from a tray being held by Bun B; and half a season of Patrick Beverley and his battle-rapping sidekick serving as your organization’s propaganda wing whether you like it or not, among other things… an element of cynicism or even outright nihilism might creep into your attitude about the place you work, even if you actually enjoy your job.
As a former employee of VICE Media, LLC, I am deeply sympathetic to such an attitude. I received a company-wide email at the end of my first week working there, announcing that there would be free pizza and beer for all, and that at 5:30 p.m., we would be required to be sitting at our desks eating the pizza and drinking the beer. Shortly after the appointed time, the CEO, Shane Smith, strolled through the editorial office with Rupert Murdoch in tow. This Potemkin Village gambit was not unique for executives, I soon learned, and in fact was one of their main moves when courting new investors. And courting investors, I slightly-less-sooner learned, was the primary business that VICE was in. Everything else, the writing that it published included, was window dressing in service to the larger goal. It’s not that I responded to this realization by becoming super lazy or doing a bad job, but I absolutely took it as license to write and/or run whatever stories I wanted, especially if they were insane or involved significant expense on my employer’s behalf, for reasons of “nothing matters lol.”
But this is not about me and my goofy work bullshit, this is about Joel Embiid and his goofy work bullshit. I am not necessarily saying that Joel Embiid has adopted such a mindset due to the Sixers’ wicked ways. After all, this is a man who used to tell his teammates at Kansas that he’d killed a lion just to fuck with them, and then kept doing it early on in his professional career. That one Bane line is a meme for a reason, is what I’m saying. Yet his penchant for screwing around has only grown. This is a man who loves crotch-chopping on camera so much, regardless of any financial penalties he might incur, that upon receiving a literal Olympic gold medal, the guy simply could not help himself and hit ’em with the D-Generation X. He must know that any time the Sixers have some sort of public drama, which is often, that his vague tweets in reaction to some international cycling event or whatever will lead to fans interpreting his post reading “WHAT A DISASTER!!!” as his commentary on the situation, and yet he continues to do it, presumably because it is very funny.
He’s the reason for the team’s existence in its current iteration, the most significant and longest-lasting result of a turbo-tank whose nickname he co-opted. He enjoys input on trades / personnel decisions, and he might actually be the only one in the organization who can sway management’s actions: At the start of the pandemic, Josh Harris announced that he’d be cutting Sixers’ non-player employee salaries by 20 percent, after which Embiid offered to step in make up for workers’ lost wages, which led to Harris calling takesies-backsies on the entire plan. Even in Labor Hero mode, Embiid still managed to troll: By stepping in as the generous multi-millionaire star, he also effectively called out Harris as the cheapskate billionaire that he is.
And despite the fact that the Sixers front office, for reasons that they cannot help but not disclose, are keeping him off the court, Joel Embiid has somehow managed to do two of the funniest things that have occurred during this still-young NBA season, even though he’s been on camera during maybe two percent of any given Sixers game. One was the butt-scratch-and-sniff-then-free-throw, which was obviously just him fucking around to make his teammates laugh but was fake-newsed into his “new free-throw routine.” The other was that he managed to earn a technical foul from the sidelines because he waved a towel while a guy was shooting free-throws, which at the time it happened seemed very funny but incensed the opposing team’s announcers because apparently you’re not allowed to do that. He waved the towel during overtime, and while he was out of the shooter’s line of sight I guess if the refs had caught him it could have resulted in some extra free throws. But he definitely got tech’d exclusively due to a tech-nicality (sorry).
Meanwhile, when it comes to the hubris of the analytics-minded basketball GM, the chickens may be coming home to roost. Philly’s President of Basketball Operations, Daryl Morey, became famous for pioneering the “Moneyball, But Make It Basketball” schtick during his time overseeing the Rockets, which led him to trade for James Harden and assemble a team around him that just constantly jacked threes all the time. With the current Sixers roster, he’s abandoned that plan, both in terms of James Harden and also three-jacking, but if you consume enough interviews with him, you’ll discover frequent references to implied odds, expected value, and having access to non-public metrics. According to at least two interviews that I can recall off the top of my head, he’s claimed that the analytics told him that teams with three stars have better odds of winning a championship than teams with only two. While I’m sure that this claim would bear out if you ran the numbers, this magic metric led Morey to spend months screwing around with his players’ contracts in order to engineer a situation in which the league’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement hit over the summer, he would have basically unlimited cap space with which to sign a free agent to a third max deal. That player was Paul George, who is awesome. But unfortunately, much like Joel Embiid, Paul George also suffers from an affliction I like to call Exploding Knee Syndrome.
The idea, though, as expressed by George in his post-signing press conference, was that his presence would help Embiid not feel like the entire team was on his shoulders and vice versa, and that if one of them had to sit out a game, the other would aid Tyrese Maxey in keeping the team afloat. But then, George got hurt in the preseason, Embiid is being held out, and as valiant as Maxey has been so far, the team has only won a single game. I’m not sure what the analytics have to say about all of this, but I’m going to go ahead and assume that there’s a chart hanging on the wall in Daryl Morey’s office that looks something like this:
In a recent review of Michael Silver’s The Why is Everything: A Story of Football, Rivalry, and Revolution for The Baffler, Leif Weatherby notes that in sports, a dedication to analytics might be “called ‘innovation,’ but it’s also called covering your ass.” Weatherby continues, “Commentators now obsess about [...] a decision was “correct” even if — especially if — it didn’t work out. The ‘why’ wants you to be responsible, not take a risk, and what counts as responsible comes from data and systems, not human judgment.” And yet, of the oodles of analytics-minded coaches at the center of Silver’s book, the ones who allegedly revolutionized the sport, only one has actually won a Super Bowl.
The failure of revolutionary analytics to produce revolutionary results brings to mind the famous Marshawn Lynch quote, “Run through a motherfucker’s face, you’re ain’t gonna have to worry about them no more.” No matter what the stats tell you, sports are anchored not just in probability, but physically imposing your will upon others. No defensive formation could hold Marshawn Lynch back when he decided he was going into the end zone, just as no amount of “three points is more than two so let’s shoot a shitload of threes” on the Warriors’ part could have possibly stopped LeBron James from doing this:
The problem with analytics, ultimately, is that relying on the data gives you an out. You have some mumbo-jumbo you can point to and say, “We knew there was a risk of this happening.” But no amount of post-facto numerical justification can make it so that the things that occur in reality can be changed. Maybe the idea that something other than this could have happened to the Sixers is simply another lie that Harris-Blitzer Sports & Entertainment is telling us.
A Song Recommendation So Good It’s Worth a Dollar
Dan Spencer — “Beat Your Ass to Death”
If you have ever wanted to listen to a plaintive gospel song about fighting someone until they are dead, then boy, have I got a song for you.
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Drew Millard
