"The Referees Fucking Suck" - Joel Embiid, Who Has A Point
Listen. I’m obviously not an excuse guy. But Joel Embiid has a point here. The referees fucking sucked. Kendall Jenner was not in the building. I honestly think the league should consider voiding this game. If I’m the Sixers, I immediately protest the win. It’s just not right.
And here’s the thing–I know there are going to be plenty of people out there who will be giving Joel shit about blaming the refs. The refs are bad in pretty much every game in pretty much every sport ever played. I would say that referees, meteorologists, and NJ Transit are the 3 major fields of work that people can go into if they enjoy being completely incompetent while remaining gainfully employed. So if the refs are absolute trash in every game, you need to find a way to overcome them instead of just throwing the blame on them. I get it. I totally understand that maybe Joel’s mentality there should have been to score a basket instead of trying to draw a call on Horford.
With all of that being said…I have no issue with this from Embiid. He put plenty of blame on himself during the actual press conference. It wasn’t like he just got up there and only blamed the refs. That would be a completely different story. But he admitted that he made some mistakes out there, he admitted that he has to be better, he was frustrated and decided to get in a clean shot there at the end to voice his displeasure with the officiating crew. That right there shows me that Joel Embiid is a competitor who just wants everybody out there on the floor to do their best job. That goes for himself, for his teammates, for his coaches, for the referees. All he wants and all he demands is excellence. It was a clean shot. Nothing more, nothing less.
Now we just wait until the Sixers get to play the Celtics in the playoffs and Kendall Jenner is there sitting courtside for every game. There’s not a ref in the world whose incompetence can cancel out the Bendall effect for the Sixers. Believe that.