Walking off the floor after a demoralizing 125-89 Game 4 loss, Joel Embiid told a taunting Drake that he and the Sixers would be “back” in Toronto for a Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semis.
Embiid added that “it sucks” to be hampered by an illness in the series.
Jimmy Butler said Philadelphia “laid an egg” in the loss, and must now figure out how to slow down Kawhi Leonard with their season on the line.
Per The Athletic:
Lumbering forward, Embiid spotted a giddy Drake, the hip-hop star and Raptors ambassador, and shouted, “I’ll be back. I’ll be back.”
The 33-point, 10-rebound, five-block performance in Game 3 has to be close to the standard, not an outlier for Embiid if the 76ers are able to pull off the impossible.
“It sucks,” Embiid said of his illness-impacted play since what looked like a breakthrough performance. “I know I’ve got to do a better job for us to win. I’ve got to do the little things. When I’m needed to score the ball, I’ve got to show up. Setting screens, I need to do a better job of rebounding the ball. That’s on me. I can’t control my physical condition, but I can control how much I push myself, and I try to do that; I just got to do more. I know that I’ve got to go back to Game 3, the same energy. Got to have fun. That’s one of the keys of me playing so well this whole season, this postseason. I got to smile on the court. I got to lift my teammates up. I shouldn’t care about offending anybody. I just got to be myself and just not really care and do whatever I want to. At the end of the day, that’s how I dominate.”
In two of the three games in Toronto, Embiid was too sick to participate in film sessions and shootarounds, hammering home that no ability can top availability.
“It doesn’t matter what type of condition I’m in. I know it doesn’t matter,” Embiid said. “I know that my presence on the court, no matter what I’m going through, if it’s not scoring the ball, I know that I can help so much more by just being out there. I got to push through it. It’s about two and half hours, three hours, trying to get through it and that’s what I’m going to keep doing.”
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