Picking All-Star Game participants is hard. Picking All-Star starters is even harder. Unfortunately, someone is going to end up missing out who deserves a starting nod in the NBA’s mid-season showcase, and in the Eastern Conference, the player who has the most justifiable gripe about not starting in Salt Lake City next month is Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid. One of the frontrunners for the MVP award this season, Embiid lost out on a starting spot to Giannis Antetokounmpo, Kevin Durant, and Jayson Tatum.
Now, for a collection of words that will come to the surprise of absolutely no one: Daryl Morey thinks Embiid got “completely hosed.” Morey appeared on a Philadelphia radio show on Friday morning and touched on Embiid missing out, and blamed “the shameless Boston media” that is “way overrepresented” in the voting process.
We think Morey is having some fun with this for an audience of people — Philadelphia fans who listen to sports talk radio — who are very likely to get some joy out of jokes about Boston sports media. This is in part due to the fact that the media voted Embiid third, behind Tatum in first and Antetokounmpo in second. The players also put Embiid in third (Antetokounmpo and Durant were ahead of him), while the fans were the ones who put Embiid the lowest, as they had him in fourth behind the three dudes who ended up getting sporting nods. (Daryl, if we have an incorrect read on this and you are actually trying to wage war with Boston sports media, we will happily correct.)
Morey did go on to bring up the NBA’s resistance to making All-Star and All-NBA teams positionless and rewarding “the 5-best people” despite the fact that “there’s so many players that are unique to history that you can’t put ’em in a box of an F label, or a G label, or a C label.”