Wait, Joel Embiid is the reason the Philadelphia 76ers lost to Toronto?

Joel Embiid is not unflappable.

When he plays bad, he’s the first person to let the world know, and sometimes, he’ll even poo poo on a totally fine performance because it doesn’t reach his uniquely high standards.

This passion is what makes Embiid great and a living legend in the City of Brotherly Love. It, fortunately, or not, also leads to moments where “The Process” can’t hide his pain and leads to his now-viral reaction to losing to the Toronto Raptors in the 2019 Eastern Conference Semifinals.

Did Joel Embiid play up to his typical standards during that series? No, but to call him the reason the Philadelphia 76ers didn’t make their first Eastern Conference Finals appearance since the Allen Iverson era is just foolish.

The Philadelphia 76ers didn’t lose to the Toronto Raptors because of Joel Embiid.

Think back to the 2018-19 Philadelphia 76ers, if you will, and the specific circumstances that brought them to the Eastern Conference. The team had traded away Robert Covington and Dario Saric less than a quarter of the way through the season and had doubled-down on their win-now efforts with a deadline-skirting, multiple-player deal to land Tobias Harris, Mike Scott, and Boban Marjanovic in February.

Surely momentum was at an all-time high, and Philly fans were excited to see the starring lineup of Butler, Harris, J.J. Redick, Ben Simmons, and Joel Embiid duke it out with the best of the best in a wide-open Eastern Conference without Kevin Durant, LeBron James, or James Harden.

While Embiid hadn’t yet reached his NBA prime, he’d elevated his game to a new level from his rookie and sophomore efforts and looked primed to surpass his team’s efforts in 2017-18, when the team had to rely on buyout additions to overachieve versus expectations.

Surely this was a championship-or-bust sort of season, even if Daryl Morey wasn’t yet around to say it, and the Sixers’ future would be defined by their postseason fate.

Unfortunately, that is what happened.

It all started versus the Brooklyn Nets in Round 1. Embiid messed Game 3 with lingering knee tendinitis, but otherwise, the Sixers had little trouble steamrolling D’Angelo Russell and company, who lost four straight after taking a surprise Game 1 in South Philadelphia. Despite his sore knee, which held Embiid out of 14 of the final 24 games of the season, Embiid averaged 24.8 points in 24.3 minutes of action versus the Nets and padded out his stats with an average of 13.5 rebounds and 2.8 blocks per game.

Fast forward to Round 2, when the Sixers took on the Toronto Raptors, and things took a turn for the worse for Philly’s franchise player, as he came down with flu-like symptoms and was sick for much of the series. Embiid appeared in every game, albeit in a diminished state from his usual brilliance, and finished out the series with an average stay line of 17.6 points, 3.3 assists, and 8.7 rebounds in 33.9 minutes per game. While Embiid did help his cause with two blocks per game, he averaged twice as many turnovers and shot a brutal 37 percent from the field.

Did Embiid elevate his team in that particular series? No, if anything, the team got a bit too reliant on his exemplary performances and were unable to compensate for his diminished production despite having a top-loaded starring five, but to call Embiid the reason Philadelphia lost that precious series, as a source close to you know who inferred in talks with Ramona Shelbourne, is just silly.

Why? Well, let me count the ways.

For one thing, the Philadelphia 76ers were better than the Toronto Raptors when Embiid was on the court. Mind you, that isn’t an opinion; over the seven-game series, Embiid had a +/- of +89, which means his team outscored their opponents by 89 points over the 237 minutes he was on the court.

According to friend of the blog Sean Barnard, Embiid’s primary backup, Greg Monroe, was a -23 over the 48.6 minutes he was on the court, and Boban Marjanovic was an astounding -44 over 27.6 minutes of action. If the Sixers have an even average backup center in that series, they probably win.

But hey, that’s just nerd stuff, right? Having a positive +/- doesn’t mean Jack if a team doesn’t win, right? Well, here’s the thing; even with Embiid’s individual numbers down from the series prior, the team came an incredibly unlikely Kawhi Leonard shot away from taking the series to overtime. Had that shot, which Embiid contested after one of his teammates sagged off of his man, not gone in, the Sixers would have taken the game into overtime and could have pulled out the win versus a Toronto Raptors squad they outscored over the series.

Embiid didn’t miss a shot, or heavens forbid pass up a shot, to secure the loss, or even take the final play of the game off to give Leonard an easy ‘oop. No, he fought to the end and cried that his 21 points in 45:12 weren’t good enough to secure his fans a few more games of playoff basketball.

In terms of leaving it all on the court, it’s hard to find a more textbook example than Embiid’s showing in Game 7.

Basketball isn’t professional wrestling. The outcome of any given game isn’t fixed to push forward a specific narrative, and sometimes, the “good guys” lose in the end despite putting their everything into the pursuit of greatness. Even hampered by a lethal cocktail of knee soreness and illness, Joel Embiid put the Philadelphia 76ers on his back in the 2019 Toronto Raptors series and tried to will his team to victory despite certainly not being 100 percent. While I’m sure it was embarrassing to play on such a national stage at less than full strength, that sort of fear is what separates the good players from the great ones and what makes a player unflappable among a fanbase who values effort above all else.