Joel Embiid And Andre Drummond Are Beefing, We Got Some Basketbeef Here

Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid is a big fat out-of-shape butt and also a very fine television actor, according to Detroit Pistons center Andre Drummond. Let’s back up and make some sense of that.

Drummond was ejected from last night’s Sixers-Pistons game; he received his second technical foul of the evening, triggering a mandatory dismissal, when Embiid flopped theatrically to embellish some light, possibly incidental contact between his face and Drummond’s hand. The two very large men have some minor history of saltiness between them, and generally seem to dislike each other: They’ve sniped back and forth through the media before, and Embiid, a world-class troll, famously waved goodbye to Drummond when the latter fouled out of a game between their teams last December.

Last night, after the game—which Drummond’s Pistons won in overtime, thanks mostly to Blake Griffin having the best game of his career—Embiid told reporters that “I think I own a lot of real estate in [Drummond’s] head” and that “he knows damn well that he can’t guard me.” Not really disproving either of these claims, and probably providing supporting evidence for at least one of them, Drummond has now fired back via two different online social media:

(One thing I have learned from extensive social media use is that the cry-laughing emoji definitely always means that the poster is extremely not-mad and is in fact truly laughing their head off.)

There are three separate lines of response, here, and I like them all, for different reasons. The first, Joel Embiid is fat and out of shape, is fun because it seems to at least abut the truth—Embiid does indeed seem to get winded relatively quickly, even relative to other basketball behemoths—and it rules when pro athletes say this type of shit publicly instead of defaulting to Hey that’s a great player over there, always gives it a hundred and ten percent, gotta give him all due respect for what he’s done in this game. (And there’s at least the spicy possibility that this is a subject of discussion and/or derision among what I’m guessing is no small number of other NBA players who don’t like Embiid.) The second one, Joel Embiid is a fine actor, give him an Emmy Award, is just a nice tip o’ the cap to a competitor. The third, which goes If he’s so much better than me, how come he likes it when I get ejected is hilariously feeble and tortured, a brutal self-own that thinks it is a devastating parry, and I love it so goddamn much. In any event, I heartily encourage this beef, as well as all others.