Joel Embiid: the star who toppled critics and implicit bias to win NBA MVP

F or a good chunk of the 2010s it was an open question in the NBA as to whether Joel Embiid, who was crowned the league’s Most Valuable Player this week, was even worth the bother. For a solid three years the Philadelphia 76ers tempted fate while aggressively trying to lose games just to put themselves in position to land the freshman center with the third pick in the 2014 draft, effectively reinventing the practice now known as tanking. And when the Kansas product went on to miss his first two seasons because of a bum foot, hoops purists praised the basketball gods for serving the Sixers their just deserts.

All the while general manager Sam Hinkie encouraged fans to “trust the process”. But they couldn’t help but wonder if Embiid, a master troll, was winding them up by only showing flashes of his great potential. Charles Barkley and Shaquille O’Neal were most prominent among the critics who had dismissed the seven-footer as a “Tall Man”, the bad word for the big-man scorer who forgoes his obvious size advantage close to the basket to chuck away with abandon from beyond the three-point arc.

Three years ago, after watching Embiid shrink from a challenge against an undersized Boston Celtics team, Barkley and O’Neal summed up Embiid with the worst word of them all: soft. “It’s not that it’s hate,” Shaq said. “It’s that we see greatness in him.” But to Embiid’s immense credit, he vowed to up his game. “I appreciate everything you say,” he told them after a strong bounce back in his very next game. “Thank you.”

So it was only fitting that on Tuesday night O’Neal and Barkley were the ones to award the MVP to Embiid. “I still remember the conversation we had a couple years ago,” he told the Inside the NBA crew on a video call