From the second Sixers center Joel Embiid stepped on an NBA floor, his impact on winning has been tough to ignore.
Despite appearing in just 31 games in 2016-17, Embiid received NBA Rookie of the Year buzz because of how drastically he changed the Sixers’ fortunes when he did play. (Embiid would go on to finish third behind Malcolm Brogdon and teammate Dario Šarić.)
Here are some numbers, via Cleaning The Glass: In 2016-17, the Sixers outscored opponents by 3.5 points per 100 possessions when Embiid was on the floor. That is a good mark, but the context makes it more impressive. Embiid was playing for a franchise that lost 72 games the season before, and despite some minor upgrades to the roster, the Sixers were a whopping 12.7 points per 100 possessions better with Embiid on the floor. That ranked in the 96th percentile of all players.
Embiid had a little help (we see you, Robert Covington and Ersan Ilyasova), but he was lifting a green, below-average roster to respectability almost solely on his shoulders. And that type of impact isn’t something we always see from rookies, even those who eventually become great players.
Since Embiid built a stronger base to work off than almost all of his peers, he essentially disqualified himself from all future NBA Most Improved Player awards. But even with his immediate outsized impact, he needed plenty of improvement to go from the league’s best per-minute rookie to the runner-up finisher in MVP voting a season ago.
