Philadelphia 76ers: Joel Embiid deserves the James Harden treatment

In the NBA, there are only so many true superstars.

Sure, the term gets thrown around like it’s nothing, with Kendrick Perkins having no qualms with placing the title on second-year guard LaMelo Ball, but as Zach Lowe suggested on a recent episode of ESPN’s NBA Today, that simply isn’t true. For a player to truly rise to superstar status, they need to dominate on the court for sure, inspiring a new generation of hoopers in the process, but they also have to transcend the sport and capture the cultural zeitgeist outside of the court.

Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid breathes in that rarified air.

A legitimate MVP candidate who had started every All-Star game he’s appeared in, Embiid is elite both on and off the court. He’s the best post player in the NBA at both ends of the court – don’t @ me – and has backed it up with a steady 3 point shot, an improved handle, and vast improvements as a playmaker. Factor in his leadership abilities and willingness to galvanize his troops around the greater good, and any team in the NBA would love to have “The Process” on their roster and would surely pay him the max-est of max contracts to make that happen without batting an eye.

Can Joel Embiid be the best player on a championship team? If the answer is yes – which it is – then why not build the Philadelphia 76ers around what he does best?

The Philadelphia 76ers should give Joel Embiid the James Harden treatment.

In Houston, James Harden was a one-man wrecking crew.

Granted, he did play alongside a few All-Stars during his 8.25 year run in the Space City, from Dwight Howard, to Chris Paul, and Russell Westbrook, but for much of his run the league MVP did it on his own, with a roster built around his unique brand of basketball.

The results, while not quite of championship pedigree, were pretty darn good.

Over their shared tenure, Harden and Daryl Morey never had a losing record, averaged a win percentage of 63.9, and had the fifth league-highest win total of any team in the NBA – regular season and playoffs –  from 2012-20 according to Statmuse.

Had the Rockets not played in the same conference as the Golden State Warriors during the Steph Curry/Klay Thompson/Draymond Green/eventually Kevin Durant era, maybe there would have been a banner hanging prominently in the Toyota Center, but alas, them’s the breaks, I guess.

So how did Morey do it? How did he take the third member of OKC’s Big 3 and build one of the West’s perennial powers? Smart roster composition.

Before Harden became a near-10 assists per game guy, he was one of the most dominant scorers in the NBA who could do incredible damage both on and off the ball. To complement his abilities, the 3s, the ISOs, the pick-and-roll stepbacks, and foul-chasing flops, Morey landed Harden screen-setting bigs like Howard, Nene, and Clint Capella, identified combo guards like Eric Gordon, Lou Williams, and Jeremy Lin, and, most importantly of all, a slew of 3-and-D wings of all shapes and sizes.

Morey accepted advanced analytics before most, embraced the small-ball revolution to a sometimes comical degree, and never met a draft pick he wouldn’t happily trade for an immediate, veteran upgrade.

To this point in his career, Joel Embiid hasn’t been afforded that sort of singular roster focus.

Mind you, that isn’t all on Morey. The former Houston head honcho is either the fourth, fifth, or general manager of Embiid’s tenure, depending on how you count Jerry Colangelo and Brett Brown, and all of those men have had to marry Embiid’s needs with that of Ben Simmons, who needs relatively similar but crucial different pieces around him for his game to succeed.

Despite still having a locker in Camden, a spot on the payroll, and his name on the injury report before every game, Simmons is effectively out of the equation and thus all attention should turn to building a contender around JoJo.

If that means adding a second star then great; Morey did that with Chris Paul in 2017-18 and came an ankle injury away from the NBA finals, but it doesn’t have to. The other time the Rockets made it to the Western Conference Finals during the Morey-Harden marriage – in 2015 – the team’s second-best player was Dwight Howard, who only averaged 15.8 points and 10.5 rebounds per game.

If the Sixers are smart about how they handle the Simmons trade, they can certainly craft a roster around Embiid and Tyrese Maxey, with complementary players like Tyrese Haliburton, Harrison Barnes, and Buddy Hield – or whomever – filling out a roster designed around the team’s best player instead of players like Tobias Harris, who were explicitly targeted and extended because of their fit alongside 25.

Is Haliburton better than, say, Jrue Holiday, the second-best player on the Milwaukee Bucks? Right now, probably not, but he’s certainly just as good as the former Sixer was during his second professional season and would perfectly complement both Embiid and Maxey with his plus passing and lethal 3 point shooting. If the team can secure a player like that, get off of Harris (more on that here) and still walk away with a deeper war chest capable of keeping them in play for a future disgruntled All-Star – as Bobby Marks suggested in his NBA trade primer – why not do it? No one is faulting Milwaukee for trading three first-round picks plus Eric Bledsoe and George Hill for Holiday now that there’s a banner hanging in the Fiserv Forum.

There’s no doubt about it, the Philadelphia 76ers are Joel Embiid’s team; their ceiling is his ceiling, their floor is his floor and the team’s fortunes are directly tied to his. To his credit, Embiid has embraced that challenge and has turned in the best season of his career as a result. It’s now on Daryl Morey to build a team around his best player, a player he once compared to Hakeem Olajuwon, and put him in the best position to succeed, whether that means waiting until this summer for a star or radically reshaping the roster around his needs and his needs alone. Either way, it’s all part of “The Process.”