Joel Embiid's DPOY Stretch

The Sixers were hot winning 10 games in January, matching their win total from the previous season. It is no coincidence that during this run, Joel Embiid was a starter for 7 of those 10 games that Philly won. Joel’s impact on both ends of the floor prove that his time spent rehabbing was worth the wait. One can only hope that Embiid’s health continues to prosper and that he doesn’t have any injury issues down the line. His minutes restriction does limit the ceiling of his impact on the court, but even with it Embiid is putting in work. It is safe to say that Embiid’s the runaway rookie of the year at this point,barring injuries. This can be contributed to his impact on both ends of the court, offensively and defensively.

For the sake of looking into the recent Sixers hot streak in January I changed some of the filters on the data. I first made the range of games to only include the last 15 games, this was as of January 31st. The second thing I changed was that it was restricted to Centers who played a minimum average of 20 minutes played. Defensive Impact is broken down into 6 fields: Steals, Blocks, Defensive rebounds, FGs defended at Rim Made, FGs Defended at Rim Attempted, and FGs Defended at Rim Percent.

Here is a dashboard I made to show Embiid's defensive numbers vs some of the top centers in the league. All Sixers players are red data points.

https://public.tableau.com/views/Last15gamesofCentersMP20/Dashboard1?:embed=y&:display_count=yes