SI:AM | The Sixers Need James Harden’s Help to Survive Again With or Without Their Newly Crowned MVP
Sixers #Sixers
Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. The best part of Joel Embiid winning the MVP was definitely his digging up this nine-year-old tweet.
In today’s SI:AM:
🔔 A deserving MVP
⚾ MLB’s embrace of prop comedy
🤔 A fun thought experiment about baseball in Mexico City
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James Harden needs to do it again
Joel Embiid is your 2022–23 NBA Most Valuable Player. It’s a crowning achievement for a player who very well could have flamed out entirely when the Sixers drafted him in ’15, and he spent two full seasons sidelined with a foot injury. But Embiid has exceeded every expectation for his coming out of Kansas to become one of the league’s elite, Rohan Nadkarni writes.
It’s become so easy to define his career by his playoff foibles, the majority of which have been out of his control—ill-timed injuries, once-in-a-lifetime shots, teammate meltdowns—that it’s become difficult to remember it’s unbelievable Embiid is here in the first place. By the end of 2017, it would have been an accomplishment if he could have simply participated in a full season. By the end of ’18, Embiid was so good that his success invited all the pressure he plays under today. For all the hand-wringing about Philly’s tanking, many teams would have forfeited a couple of seasons for a talent such as Embiid.
Embiid led the league in scoring for the second year in a row with 33.1 points per game. The last 7-footer to win a scoring title was Shaquille O’Neal in 2000, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain are the only players that tall to have won consecutive scoring titles. Perhaps most impressively, Embiid did it by bucking the leaguewide trend toward bombing from three-point range. While he has a better perimeter shot than 7-footers of previous generations, only 9% of his points this season came on threes.
Embiid’s remarkable season is the reason for the Sixers’ success, but they were forced to contend with life without him against the Celtics in Game 1 of the conference semifinals due to a knee injury.
An Embiid injury sunk Philadelphia last year when he missed Games 1 and 2 against the Heat in the second round, and the Sixers fell into an 0–2 hole they never recovered from. Philly needed another player capable of taking over the game and didn’t have one, but this year might be different. James Harden turned back the clock and scored 45 points Monday, tied for a career playoff high.
But can he do it again? It’s a lot to ask a 33-year-old Harden to have another career night on the road against a full-strength Boston team, even if Embiid plays tonight in Game 2. The Sixers needed a lot of things to break their way to come away with the win, like Malcolm Brogdon’s ill-advised pass that led to Tyrese Maxey’s go-ahead basket. De’Anthony Melton, a 39% three-point shooter in the regular season, hit five of his six threes. And while Paul Reed stepped into a starting role down low and collected 13 rebounds, the Sixers still got outrebounded 38–28.
In one sense, Embiid’s developing into an MVP is validation of the Sixers’ much-derided Process. But that Process won’t really be complete until Philadelphia wins a championship, and, unfortunately, Embiid’s tendency to get injured has hurt the Sixers’ chances.
The best of Sports Illustrated 
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
5. Padres pitcher Blake Snell trying to wrap his head around advanced statistics.
4. Carmelo Anthony’s reaction to Jalen Brunson’s go-ahead three in the fourth quarter.
3. Anthony Santander’s 16-pitch at-bat in which he fouled off 12 straight pitches.
2. Stars veteran Joe Pavelski’s four-goal night. At 38, he’s the oldest player to score four goals in a game.
1. Yanni Gourde’s overtime winner for the Kraken to render Pavelski’s heroics moot.
SIQ
This week in 1979, which MLB player became the second (after Willie Mays) to record 300 home runs and 300 stolen bases?
Yesterday’s SIQ: With an 0-for-3 day against Cleveland on May 2, 1941, Ted Williams’s batting average dipped as low as it ever did during his record-setting .406 season. What was his average after that day?
Answer: .308. An ankle injury limited Williams to mostly pinch-hitting duties during the first week of the season, so by May 2, he’d made only 25 plate appearances, leaving his batting average susceptible to dramatic swings based on one bad game. After going hitless in that day’s game in Cleveland, Williams’s average fell from .348 to .308.
But Williams was remarkably consistent over the rest of the month. He had 11 multihit games from May 4 to 30, including five three-hit games and two four-hit games. A 4-for-5 day against the Yankees on May 25 brought his average above .400 for the first time that season. By the end of May, he was hitting .429, and, on June 6, his average rose to a season high of .436.
After the second-to-last day of the season, Williams was technically hitting below .400. A 1-for-4 day dropped his average to .39955, which would be rounded up in the history books, but Williams wanted to hit a legitimate .400, so he insisted on playing the season-ending doubleheader against the A’s. He went 6-for-8 over both games to finish at .408.
A few players have made a run at the hallowed .400 figure since then—most notably Tony Gwynn, who was hitting .394 when a strike halted the 1994 season. Another player is putting up gaudy numbers this season. Marlins infielder Luis Arraez, last season’s AL batting champ with the Twins, is batting .435.