Culture
Amick: Joel Embiid deserved better, and the NBA's 65-game rule game is flawed
SAN FRANCISCO — Joel Embiid didn’t speak.
Not with his words, anyway.
The Philadelphia 76ers big man who had been ridiculed for three days after his latest disappearance, and whose MVP defense is in such early peril because of the league’s 65-game rule that is putting so much pressure on his sensitive situation, didn’t have to say anything after he’d left the Chase Center floor in such pain late Tuesday night due to an apparent knee injury.
As was the case on Saturday afternoon, when his late scratch against the Denver Nuggets sparked a chorus of criticism about his perceived lack of willingness to take on a fellow great in Nikola Jokić, the awful optics were enough.
Only this time, in stark contrast to that Mile High City mishap, Embiid had suddenly become a sympathetic figure. And if anyone was scared, as he’d been accused of being in some high-profile media circles, it was the Sixers team (29-17) that now finds itself fifth in the Eastern Conference standings after losing 119-107 to Golden State.
It spoke volumes that Sixers coach Nick Nurse was inordinately slow to attend his postgame news conference, or that his responses to questions about the left knee injury suffered with 4 minutes, 4 seconds remaining in their fourth straight loss seemed so rehearsed. It’s never a good sign when a team’s top front office executive, in this case, the Sixers’ Daryl Morey, is making the rounds in the back hallways of the visitor’s arena in pursuit of perspective from the team’s medical staff. All of the Sixers parties who matter most were clearly concerned.
As for Embiid, he opted against speaking to reporters afterward while prioritizing an ice bath that lasted long into the night. And with good reason.
The MRI results will determine how worried these Sixers need to be as they forge ahead on this title-contending mission. For Embiid’s résumé, he can miss only five more games before being ruled ineligible for the kind of postseason awards that have shaped the legacies of greats for so long. That’s the micro of it all. The Warriors’ Jonathan Kuminga fell on Embiid’s left knee late in the game, and his night full of laborious movement mercifully ended with Warriors fans wishing him well on the way out with cheers and even a few mini-standing ovations.
But the macro, and the thing that should inspire fans and reporters alike to think twice about how we discuss this massive man who is such a basketball treasure when his body allows him to be, is that Embiid is very clearly fighting through the same sort of physical ailments that have dogged him for so much of his 10-year career.
As one Sixers source indicated late Tuesday night, he has been dealing with soreness in that same left knee all season. And while Nurse indicated that the injury that forced his late exit was somehow different from the one that had been dogging him of late, the Embiid theme remained unchanged: He was battered and bruised before February even arrived, and his ability to be at his best from here on out is suddenly in serious question again.
Did we all forget that the reigning MVP missed his first two full seasons with foot injuries, or that he has hit the hallowed 65-game mark only twice in the seven seasons in which he has played? There are shades of Yao Ming here, with the talent so transcendent but that nagging sense of physical doom and gloom always waiting around the proverbial corner.
Embiid has already accomplished far more than the 7-foot-6, 310-pound former Houston Rockets big man was able to in his nine-year career that was cut short by injuries, but the unwelcome parallels are there. Starting with the size.
You could see it long before he was hurt against the Warriors. Embiid, who missed Philadelphia’s game at Portland on Monday night, looked like a player who pushed himself to play against Golden State because the whole basketball world was screaming in his ear. There are people within the Sixers who are convinced that he played only because of all the scrutiny.
He was awful by his lofty standards, finishing with 14 points, seven rebounds and two assists while missing 13 of 18 shots and settling for jumpers on all but one attempt. Embiid has always lumbered up and down the floor, but this was a level of tentativeness and instability not often seen from him. And to hear Sixers guard Kelly Oubre discuss Embiid’s ill-fated evening afterward was to be reminded that gravity has never been his friend. While Embiid is listed at 7 feet and 280 pounds, it is widely believed that those measurements fall short of his actual size.
“(You’ve got people) pressuring him to force being great when he’s 300 pounds (and) 7 foot 5?” Oubre said while exaggerating Embiid’s height. “Like, c’mon bro. … I think this year, people will really understand that his whole career he’s been having to make sure his body’s right. This is like NASCAR, right? If their cars ain’t working, and their mechanics ain’t really able to get the job done before the race, then what can they do? They can’t race.
“This is our bodies. Our body is our car and we have to treat it with respect. He’s 350 pounds, bro. So you know, I’m praying for him for a speedy recovery, so he can come in and give himself the best chance. But at the end of the day, that’s not important. His body and his career (are) most important.”
So maybe we all should have dug a little deeper here before destroying him for his absence in Denver. Yours truly included.
There was the evidence that was largely ignored from the Thursday night game against Indiana when Embiid went down midway through the second quarter and appeared to hurt that same left knee that would be his undoing in Denver. Nonetheless, he played through it against the Pacers and finished with 31 points, seven rebounds and three assists in 31 minutes.
Fast forward two nights, and it was entirely fair to wonder why Embiid wasn’t on the injury report heading into the Nuggets game (and make no mistake, the league has been investigating that very matter). But the criticism regarding his absence went much further than that.
Embiid was deemed a coward in some circles, someone who would rather get booed (which he was) than take on Jokić in his building. Never mind that he had just bested Jokić in Philadelphia less than two weeks before.
Yet, while it’s true that Embiid hasn’t played in Denver since 2019, and that he has now missed six of their eight meetings in the Mile High City while Jokić has played every time, the context matters a great deal here. A quick recap for the sake of fairness to Embiid.
His first two Denver absences (Dec. 30, 2017, and Jan. 26, 2019) came during a time when rest was an even bigger part of his rehabilitation program. And while they were the most suspect of the six, that Embiid was still in the early days of putting together a sustained NBA run while trying to stay healthy was surely no small factor. Yet the three that preceded Saturday’s absence — with all of them coming after the last Jokić-Embiid showdown on Nov. 8, 2019 — were different enough that they deserve examining.
- March 30, 2021: Embiid had been out since March 12 with a bone bruise on his left knee, and he wouldn’t return until April 3 (two games later against Minnesota). This one is indisputably legit.
- Nov. 18, 2021: Embiid missed his sixth straight game after entering the NBA’s COVID-19 health and safety protocols. He was out from Nov. 6-27. Also legit.
- March 27, 2023: Embiid sits out with a sore right calf. He would play the game before and the game after. This one, it’s safe to say, can be up for debate.
None of which is to say that the history of Embiid not playing in Denver isn’t strange. But it’s one thing to wonder aloud why the trend has emerged, and quite another to attack the competitive character of a player who is already worthy of being deemed an all-time great. Those hot takes look cold in more ways than one now.
Ditto for the premature endorsements of the league’s 65-game rule. While fans, owners, television partners and league officials have every right to want to fix the league’s load management dilemma, the early returns here are enough to make you wonder if it might need to be revisited due to unintended consequences. Is it a good thing that the reigning MVP is on the verge of exiting that conversation before we’ve reached the All-Star break?
“I didn’t sign up for that (65-game rule),” Sixers backup center Paul Reed said of the rule that was agreed on as part of the league’s collective bargaining agreement that was ratified last April and runs through the 2029-30 season. “I don’t remember signing no paperwork, you feel me? I guess the (players’) union OK’d it. They probably didn’t have a choice though, to be honest. Yeah, it’s tough. It adds a lot of pressure to the players. We were just talking about that. A lot of pressure — especially dudes like (Embiid who are) trying to get MVP again.”
Embiid getting healthy is the only priority that matters now.
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(Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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