Embiid Shines with Physical Play and Clutch Performance
Transcript
00:00I thought, for the first time in the whole tournament, I thought Embiid played well.
00:09Not only did he do well, he was very physical, almost violently physical in the game.
00:18I thought, Mike, literally, they were calling nothing away from the ball.
00:22The FIBA refs were calling nothing.
00:24It was literally tackle football out there.
00:26They were mauling each other, and no calls were being made at all.
00:30But I thought, Embiid said, all right, if we're going to play this way, I invite it.
00:34So let's go.
00:35You want to play dirty?
00:36Let's go.
00:37You want to foul and tackle and step on people?
00:39I'll run over somebody and see how you like it.
00:42But I thought he played well, and it's the first time I thought he played well.
00:45I think he had 19 hit, 8 of 11 shots, hit two threes, had a block shot, and I saw actual
00:52enthusiasm out of him, like he was having fun and he was into it.
00:57And it's the first emotion I've seen, because he's been booed the whole time he's been in
01:01Paris, and everyone hates him.
01:03Well, I think that what you saw, finally, was him taking the responsibility for playing
01:12the game in the first half.
01:14You're right.
01:15He was fantastic in the second half, and he was for the entirety of the game up to the
01:19physical challenge that Nikola Jogic presented.
01:23So give him credit for that.
01:24But he didn't want to do anything else defensively.
01:26On any switch, any opportunity, when Drew Holiday got picked off, or Steph Curry got
01:31picked off, and you had to step in the pocket and at least offer some challenge, Embiid
01:35just hung back and said, if he's going to make it, he's going to make it.
01:38Well, in this game, the answer was always, he's going to make it.
01:42Whoever it was, Bogdanovich, whoever, Misic, whoever it was, they were making that shot,
01:47and Embiid in the first half had no interest in making it a challenge.
01:51He showed in the second half that when those things happen, he could step out.
01:55He could step out and cause some traffic and make it difficult to shoot.
02:01He finally did it.
02:03In this game, once they started making threes, you needed to step forward and make it difficult.
02:09And until the second half happened, really the fourth quarter, that didn't happen.
02:13So I'll give Embiid a lot of credit for that fourth quarter and enough credit that he had
02:17a huge part in winning the game.
02:20He also had a huge part in them being in a big deficit.