Joel Embiid is putting the Philadelphia 76ers on his shoulders with an MVP-caliber season.
The Cameroonian big man is having arguably the best campaign of his career, yet he wasn’t a frontrunner to win the award until the final stretch of the season.
Most of the advanced metrics favored Nikola Jokic over him, regardless of how offensively and defensively dominant he had been throughout most of the season.
That’s why Embiid recently told Shams Charania that he doesn’t actually care about analytics.
Joel Embiid says ‘analytics don’t make sense at all’
“You can talk about analytics all you want. When you got some guys in the league, the eye test tells you that they’re not good defensively, but analytics tell you they’re the best defenders. That’s when analytics don’t make… pic.twitter.com/Ht4QMTIcwo
— NBACentral (@TheNBACentral) March 27, 2023
Per Embiid, it’s all about the eye test, as analytics can often be misleading, especially when it comes to defense.
This was a clear shot at Jokic, who was never recognized as a solid defender until now.
Embiid spent years trying to make a case for MVP, but he admitted that he just doesn’t worry about that anymore.
Jokic has been the best big man in the game for the past three years, but Embiid could’ve won MVP any other season.
Now, it seems like we’ll have an MVP race for the ages in the final ten games or so, and truth be told, the league couldn’t go wrong either way right now.
Embiid’s two-way dominance, and the fact that he’s leading the league in scoring, speaks for itself, but Jokic could be the first center to average a triple-double for a season, let alone the fact that he led the Nuggets to the first seed in the Western Conference.
Maybe, we could be looking at a Co-MVP decision this year.
NEXT: Joel Embiid Now Leads The NBA In A Big Way