Hypothetical Power Rankings: The Joel Embiid stats bonanza

One of my favorite writers lately has been Dean Demakis. At his blog, Dean on Draft, Demakis evaluates draft prospects with a pretty unforgiving eye, raking through each potential weakness in an attempt to identify the maybe one or two players from each draft class who will become real stars. And, since it’s next to impossible to be a star, it’s hard for many players to earn a compliment from Demakis.

Which is why it’s astonishing to see things like this pop up on Demakis’ Twitter when the subject is Joel Embiid:

Personally, as your years-long Hinkie apologist, I’ve never needed any convincing that drafting Embiid was the correct process-oriented move to make. (Demakis was on-board from the jump, too.) And absolutely Embiid should be an All-Star starter this year. But, man, that’s some lofty talk.

Read More: Why Joel Embiid should have made the 2017 NBA All-Star team

So, using Basketball-Reference’s Play Index, I sliced and diced the stats from Embiid’s 30 short NBA games to find who, in league history, produced comparable performances in their rookie years. The results — well, they justify the hype. Just about all of the appropriate comparisons have their number in the rafters and their hands full of rings:

5. Joel Embiid is like Tim Duncan and David Robinson = efficient defense + scoring average.

Basketball-Reference’s Defensive Box Plus-Minus stat estimates how many points per 100 possessions a player contributes to his team via defense. It’s pretty hard to get above 3.0: only 17 players with regular playing time are doing so this year, including all-defense specialists like Lucas Nogueira, Zaza Pachulia, and Dewayne Dedmon. (Among the others is, yes, Embiid.)

What’s even harder is to average at least 15 points per game while playing defense that well. Only 38 players have ever successfully done it over a full season. At 19.8 points per game, Embiid sits alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo and Russell Westbrook as the only players on pace to do so this year. But only two rookies have ever managed the feat: Duncan and Robinson. Some might call Duncan and Robinson the foundation of a championship-caliber team.

4. Joel Embiid is like Larry Bird and Bill Walton = frequently rebounding + frequently assisting + efficient defense + heavy minutes

This (admittedly convoluted) cocktail of statistics clusters together most of the non-scoring skills on the basketball court. Perhaps counter-intuitively — or maybe it is intuitively — the only players good enough at all of these skills as rookies are also gifted as scorers as well. Plus, Embiid is saving about a point per night more on defense compared to Bird — although Walton is about a point per night ahead of Embiid himself.

Only 30 players have ever finished a season keeping up all of these stats, including, uh… Mason Plumlee. Still: Bird and Walton only managed to do it in three and four other seasons, respectively.

3. Joel Embiid is like Wilt Chamberlain = points per minute

While there are some NBA players who put together better careers, taken as a whole, than Chamberlain did, there isn’t — as far as I’m concerned — a more astonishing comparison. Chamberlain played basketball before basketball was really basketball: the dude got about 46 minutes and 30 shots a night. The game is supposed to have changed too much for Chamberlain’s stats to be attainable. But here’s Embiid: his 28 points per 36 minutes is just a tick behind Chamberlain’s rookie-season 29.

This is not just a thing that’s only hard for rookies to do. Only three players managed to score at this phenomenal rate last season: DeMarcus Cousins, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant. And then it happened only three times in the previous seven seasons before that: Durant again, Russell Westbrook, and Dwyane Wade. This was only ever a regular achievement for Michael Jordan, who scored at this rate for eight seasons — even Chamberlain managed to do so just four more times in his career.

2. Joel Embiid is like nobody ever = 3-point accuracy + free throw accuracy + blocks

Now we get into the modern, floor-stretching stuff. Dozens of NBA players a year manage to shoot at least 30 percent on 3-point shots (while attempting at least one per game), sink at least 75 percent of their free throws, or block two shots a night. But no rookie has ever managed to clear all three hurdles at once. At 34.8%, 77.7%, and 2.5, Embiid is operating well above each of those benchmarks.

The twist: even when we look beyond rookies, only one player has ever pulled off a full season like this. It was Serge Ibaka two years ago, when a season-ending injury to Kevin Durant saw Oklahoma City open the playbook and play Ibaka on the arc. In subsequent years, slight decreases in Ibaka’s block rate — no doubt a result of chasing all those other stretch-4s on the perimeter — have dropped him out of the running. Besides: Embiid is blocking at a much higher per-minute or per-possession rate than Ibaka did, plus Embiid is going to the line about five times as often.

1. Joel Embiid is like nobody ever = high offensive usage + high offensive accuracy

Embiid’s usage rate alone has him lapping the field of every rookie, ever. Using 36.3 percent of his team’s possessions, Embiid is in another category of offensive responsibility from the next-closest rookie, Michael Jordan’s 29.8 percent.

Embiid isn’t just putting up sheer volume, though, with a very nice true shooting percentage of 57.5. This combination of accuracy and upper-tier frequency has only been pulled off by non-rookies on seven other occasions (since usage was tracked in 1977-78– with DeMarcus Cousins also on pace to do so this year): once apiece by Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, Tracy McGrady, Michael Jordan, Bernard King, and George Gervin. And Embiid is having a way better season than all of them on the defensive end.

Next: Embiid's minutes restrictions more logical than Strasburg's was

Put it all together, and there has really, truly never been a season anything at all like the one Joel Embiid is playing now. This is something entirely new.

Now that the Embiid pick is slowly starting to move from the present tense back to hindsight, a truly remarkable piece of video is Sam Hinkie smiling in the face of the grouchy Philadelphia press the night Embiid (and Dario Saric) was drafted. After emerging from what had to be a joyous draft room, the first three questions of the press conference are basically flung at Hinkie as if the journalists held tomatoes and he was shackled to the stocks in town square. A sampling:

"Cranky journalist: “You could’ve taken players that could’ve helped you this year, and that’s the direction you want to go?”Hinkie: “We were very aggressive — we will continue to be very aggressive — to find the best players we can for our team.”"

A little bit later, Hinkie gives the quickest of hints that he had never considered Embiid an ordinary draft pick:

"In the end we feel good. In the end we feel good that it is a calculated risk, and that he is a remarkable talent. That — in our minds — in only this scenario, in only this scenario does he — [pause] does he — [longer pause, carefully calibrating word choice] fall to three."

And this is why it has been said: trust the process.