Has Joel Embiid Become the Most Dominant Flopper in Basketball?
Will he ruin or save the NBA?
Joel Embiid and Marcus Smart have a beef going back to their college days.
The short answer is “no,” not as long as Marcus Smart and James Harden are active players.
Embiid, like all big strong players, both gives and takes a huge amount of punishment. Harden, like Smart will flop when colliding with air molecules.
For your viewing pleasure, I submit the following classics.
Marcus Smart makes history as the first human launched into space without the need of a rocket, or a Rocket. (Great angle at 0:17!)
James Harden elevates the flop into an art form.
Smart counters with his own gravity-defying antics (1:25) and gets fined by the NBA.
Smart gets fined $5000 again for flopping in last year’s playoffs.
The long answer is my dissertation on the Law of Phantom Fouls.
I presented my theory to explain the results of the 2018 Playoffs. (This is required reading to complete your basketball education, Brandon.)
Boston has the #1 defense in the league primarily because of the law of phantom fouls. This law is kind of like that theory about what happened to every one of those socks that disappear after you do a load of laundry. After a season, you’ve got an entire drawer of single socks, with no explanation on the location of the missing ones.
Well, the law of phantom fouls will finally explain where those socks go.
Do you know where fouls originate? In Boston, where they simply drip off Marcus Smart like one of those shaggy dogs that goes in the swimming pool and then shakes itself dry in the living room…
Smart makes a huge number of defensive plays where he steals the ball along with a few layers of the offensive players’ skins.
He’s like a pick pocket who steals not only the wallet but the entire pocket, leaving a trail of men walking around with gaping holes in their trousers, while the cops never notice.
But there’s a reason for these fouls to never show up on a box score in Boston… It’s because they’re needed in Houston.
Every year, one offensive superstar gets pretty much every call. Fouls are magically called where none could possibly exist.
James Harden basically plays football on the hard wood. He doesn’t just create contact, he uses defenders as tackling dummies. He has a technique where he hooks a player’s arm with his right arm while dribbling, then jumps up, pulling the player with him as he throws up a wild shot.
It doesn’t matter how much a player stays vertical, leans backwards, or runs away from contact, fouls mysteriously materialize out of thin air, just like those socks you keep losing, and those are the fouls that are not called against Smart.
In 2018, the threat posed by Smart and Harden was the reason Boston could not play Houston in the NBA Finals:
It’s like those sci-fi movies where anti-matter can’t touch matter, or a person traveling back in time can’t come in contact with themselves without risking a massive and potentially catastrophic tear in the time space continuum.
Marcus Smart guarding James Harden is kind of like that perpetual motion machine created when a piece of buttered toast is attached to the back of a cat and the cat is then tossed off a kitchen counter. While a cat always lands on its feet, a piece of buttered bread always falls butter side down on the floor. Just before the cat falls to the floor, it stops and begins to rotate as each of these unstoppable forces continuously try to touch the ground.
In the same way, the referees would be forced to simultaneously blow and swallow their whistles at the moment of the opening tip off. They would be paralyzed and quickly suffocate, forcing the league to bring in, and then lose, referees in a never ending cycle, preventing any game from ever beginning or ending. Time would come to a complete stop. The Earth would stop spinning on it axis, and all matter would simply float away into space.
With James Harden playing for the Nets, I fear for the safety of the world should Boston and Brooklyn meet in the playoffs.
The only thing that can save us is Joel Embiid.
Thanks for reading!
If you enjoyed this article, please check out part 1 of my 2021 NBA predictions.
