Raptors hope past success against Embiid carries into playoff series

Josh Lewenberg

TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – Let’s get this out of the way: there’s no stopping Joel Embiid.

Toronto can’t do it. No team can do it – not at this stage of his career anyway. He’s simply too good.

Embiid is better than he was when the Raptors neutralized him in six of the seven games during their iconic second-round playoff series with Philadelphia in 2019. He’s better than he was when they held him scoreless for the first and only time in his six-year career the following season.

The 76ers superstar is fresh off a specular campaign. He just became the first centre to win the NBA’s scoring title since Shaquille O’Neal did it more than two decades ago and will be a leading candidate for this year’s MVP award, along with fellow big men Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo.

The best you can hope for is to slow him down, make him work to get to his spots and establish position, and maybe frustrate him in the process. To his admission, nobody has done a better job of that over the years than Nick Nurse and the Toronto Raptors.

“Toronto is the only team that really just doesn’t allow me to [have the ball in my hands],” Embiid told ESPN’s Zach Lowe on his podcast in April of last year. “Every single time we play them as soon as the ball is in the air, they have three guys on me and won’t leave me alone.”

That will be the plan of attack once again, as the Raptors open their first-round series against Embiid and the 76ers in Philadelphia on Saturday.

There’s a quiet confidence from the team, and a less quiet confidence from its fan base going into this familiar matchup – a sense that Toronto is well positioned to upset the fourth-seeded Sixers. It starts with their recent track record of success against Embiid.

So, how have they done it?

At one point, most of the credit would have rightly gone to Marc Gasol – the primary defender on Embiid in that 2019 playoff series and on Nov. 25 of that same year, when the Sixers centre missed all 11 of his shots and failed to score in a loss to Toronto.

However, Nurse no longer has the luxury of throwing a nearly seven-foot, 260-pound former Defensive Player of the Year at Embiid and matching his size and physicality. Without a traditional centre on the roster, the Raptors have little hope of containing him in single coverage.

The old cliché you often hear from players and coaches when they’re asked about guarding the opposition’s best scorer is that it’s a team effort. While there’s almost always some truth to that, it’s especially the case with the Raptors and Embiid. It’s had to be.

Looking at Toronto’s roster, which is made up primarily of 6-foot-8 and 6-foot-9 forwards, the most comparable player to Embiid in terms of physical size is Khem Birch, who’s giving up at least three inches and nearly 50 pounds to Philly’s centre.

Instead of battling him one-on-one, they’ve deployed their hyper-aggressive style of play to make his life as difficult as possible. They’ve been physical with Embiid, denying him the ball and preventing him from getting deep post position. They’ll send multiple defenders at him on the catch, using their length, speed and quick hands to disrupt and make a play on the ball, ideally without committing a foul, but they’re not opposed to wrapping him up.

The idea is to make him work for everything. Nothing should come easy.

“We don’t have anyone on our team that matches him in size, but we have quickness, we have speed, and we have length, so we use that to our advantage,” Precious Achiuwa said following the Raptors’ 119-114 win over Philadelphia in Toronto last week. “We beat him to his spots, [when he goes to] his spin move and counter move someone is right there, [we throw] a lot of bodies at him, [show] different coverages, and [make] him work throughout the game.”

Since the start of that 2019 playoff series, Embiid has shot 37 per cent from the field and 27 per cent from three-point range against the Raptors. They’ve held him under 50 per cent shooting in 13 of 16 meetings. He’s shooting 51 per cent from the field and 37 per cent from three against every other team over that span, hitting at least 50 per cent of his attempts in 102 of 176 games.

Poor shooting aside, in most of those meetings with Toronto he still impacted the game like a star should. Despite battling injury, illness and those shooting woes in the second-round matchup three years ago, Philly outscored the Raptors by 90 points with Embiid on the floor. He was on the bench for 99 minutes over the course of the series, roughly 14 minutes of rest per contest, and Toronto won those minutes by 109 points, memorably punishing the Sixers whenever Greg Monroe or Boban Marjanovic were in the game.

It’s been an ongoing dilemma for Doc Rivers, not just against the Raptors, but also against everybody else. The often-injured Embiid played more games (68) and minutes (2,297) this season than ever before. He’s going to play a lot in this upcoming series, but he can’t play the entire game. More often than not, there’s going to be a drop-off when your best player goes to the bench, but with Embiid and the Sixers, that drop-off is drastic.

This season, Philly was a preposterous 522 points better when Embiid was on the floor. The acquisition of James Harden was supposed to lessen that disparity, allowing Rivers to stagger their minutes, but Embiid’s on/off court numbers remained the same after the trade. Facing the Embiid and Harden-led Sixers twice over the past three weeks, the Raptors outscored Philly by 25 points in the All-Star’s 22 rest minutes. They won both games by a combined margin of 10 points.

Whether Rivers opts to use veteran DeAndre Jordan or the more agile Paul Reed as the backup centre in this series, it’ll continue to be imperative that the Raptors take advantage whenever Embiid takes a seat.

It’ll also be interesting to see how Nurse manages his rotation, with the Embiid matchup in mind.

The Raptors used their positionless starting lineup of Fred VanVleet, Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Scottie Barnes and Gary Trent Jr. in all 21 contests that those five guys appeared in together this season. In a 345-minute sample, that unit produced a virtually neutral net rating. That group was good and showed flashes of its defensive upside, particularly over the team’s eight-game winning streak just before the All-Star break. Overall, though, it wasn’t great.

Still, Toronto went 15-6 in those 21 games, 15-3 since Jan. 1. Even in tough matchups against elite big men, like the Jokic-led Nuggets late in the season, Nurse’s clear preference has been to start games with his five best and most important players, assuming they’re all healthy and in the lineup.

The Raptors weren’t at full strength in any of the games against Philly, with Siakam missing the first, Barnes missing the second, and VanVleet and Anunoby each missing three of the four meetings. That allowed them to match up with Embiid and start one of their centres, Birch or Achiuwa. In each of the past two meetings they reluctantly started both, though that experiment was predictably short-lived.

So, will Nurse stick with his regular starters, figuring they’re going to need all five guys dedicated to the Embiid assignment anyway, or does he go with Birch or Achiuwa? And, if he does make a change, who comes out of that starting unit? Of that group, only Trent has come off the bench this year, and that was in the season opener.

According to NBA.com, Achiuwa saw the most time on Embiid, serving as the primary defender on 59.5 possessions and holding the All-Star centre to 23 points on 35 per cent shooting. Of the 37 players that guarded him on at least 40 possessions this season, only Boston’s Al Horford held him to a lower field goal percentage.

Of course, those numbers are a bit deceiving. While Achiuwa was the primary defender on those possessions, he would’ve gotten plenty of assistance from help defenders in the Raptors’ aggressive scheme. But for context, when Achiuwa or Birch were considered the primary defender, Embiid scored 34 points, shot 14-for-34 and crucially only attempted eight free throws on 94.6 combined possessions. When Siakam, Barnes or Chris Boucher were considered the primary defender, Embiid scored 53 points, shot 18-for-32 and got to the line 17 times on 81.2 combined possessions.

One thing is clear from the way Nurse and the Raptors have approached Embiid in the past: regardless of who gets the assignment, they’re not afraid to throw just about everything and everyone at him. The goal is simple in theory, but much more complicated in execution: make the role players beat you.

In the two recent meetings, Embiid, Harden and Tobias Harris combined to hit just three of their 24 three-point attempts. Everybody else shot 23-for-39, but the Raptors can live with that. They’ll have to.

Embiid is going to be the best player on the floor in this series; if he’s not, something has gone terribly wrong for Philadelphia. But if the Raptors can keep him from going supernova, having a transcendent impact and taking over games, then they’ve done their job and given themselves a chance to win.