Battling Bell’s palsy, Joel Embiid scored a career playoff-high 50 points in the 76ers‘ Game 3 victory over the Knicks. The teams play again on Sunday in Philadelphia.
Late in the first quarter on Thursday night, the large video board at Wells Fargo Center showed Allen Iverson sitting courtside. Iverson stood up, waved and acknowledged the raucous fans, many of whom remember him from his days playing for the Philadelphia 76ers.
Iverson remains a legendary figure in the city, particularly for leading the 76ers to the NBA Finals in 2001, where they lost to the Los Angeles Lakers. Since then, the franchise has not made it past the second round of the playoffs, a fact that has been repeated countless times over the past few years.
Still, after losing the first two games of their first round series against the New York Knicks, the 76ers rebounded on Thursday with a 125-114 victory in Game 3 that kept hope alive that Philadelphia can advance deep in the playoffs.
Joel Embiid scored a career playoff-high 50 points, including 33 in the second half as the 76ers erased a three-point halftime deficit. Embiid became the first 76ers player since Iverson in 2003 to score 50 points in a postseason game.
And Embiid did so despite playing with Bell’s palsy, which Johns Hopkins University defines as “an unexplained episode of facial muscle weakness or paralysis.” Embiid said he started feeling symptoms a day or two before Philadelphia’s 105-104 victory over the Miami Heat on April 17 in the Play-In game that secured the 76ers the No. 7 seed.
Since then, Embiid said he has felt symptoms in the left side of his face, including his mouth and eye, which he said “is consistently dry” and “blurry at times.” He wore dark sunglasses while addressing reporters after Thursday’s game.
“It hasn’t really necessarily gotten better,” Embiid said. “Just based on the conversations that I’ve had, it could be weeks, it could be months.
