The Sixers have been surrounded by unusually upbeat vibes since the summer. They added a nine-time All-Star in Paul George, while Tyrese Maxey earned a five-year deal and Joel Embiid inked a three-year contract extension. Their training camp in The Bahamas was an opportunity for a new-look roster to gel on the floor and bond away from it. Suddenly, a team notorious for entering seasons with dark clouds hanging over it had little to worry about.
Except for that one thing.
Sunday afternoon — right as the Philadelphia Eagles defense made a crucial fourth-quarter stand in the red zone to maintain their lead over the Cleveland Browns — the Sixers released a medical update regarding Embiid and his left knee. The update disclosed that Embiid will not appear in this year’s preseason.
MORE: Sixers say Joel Embiid will not play in preseason “as part of left knee management”
When I started covering sports, I quickly decided that I would never tell a fan how they should feel about their teams and/or players.
The entirety of the Sixers’ championship aspirations are reliant on that knee — and the rest of Embiid’s seven-foot, 280-pound body — holding up over the course of an 82-game regular season and two-month playoff run in a way that it never has before. The prospect of Embiid going down and the Sixers immediately watching their NBA Finals dreams evaporate is daunting in its likelihood.
So, I will not tell you to not worry about Embiid’s knee. But what I will do is explain why I am not in panic mode… yet.
Far too often, the Sixers have tried to play catch-up preserving Embiid’s health. He logs too many minutes, plays in too many back-to-backs, suffers an injury and then the team scrambles for answers to get him back on the floor without jeopardizing his viability in the playoffs. It has never worked.
During the winter, there were warning signs that Embiid’s knee was faltering. He took an enormous amount of heat after being a last-minute scratch in a game against Nikola Jokić and the Denver Nuggets. Just three nights after being pulled out of a nationally televised game that was supposed to pit the two best players in the NBA against one another, Embiid was back on the floor in a road contest against the Golden State Warriors, and everybody remembers what happened. It would be 63 days until he played in another game.
Is it impossible that this is what is happening now? At the team’s Media Day on Sept. 30, Embiid spoke like he never had before about the premium he and the Sixers will place on his physical well-being throughout the regular season to ensure he is in the best condition possible for April, May and June.
“There’s no agenda,” Embiid said. “There’s no All-Star, no All-NBA, none of that. It’s whatever it takes to make sure that I get to [the playoffs] and I’m ready to go.”
Too much fan trauma has been accumulated over the years from Sixers medical updates for Sunday afternoon’s release to do anything other than stir commotion. The Sixers know that and Embiid knows that. For as long as Embiid is the Sixers’ franchise cornerstone, fans will be in a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop.
There is not a single thing Embiid or the Sixers can say or do right now to quell concerns about whether or not the former NBA MVP will be delivered to the playoffs at full strength. But Embiid finally being willing to fully embrace a plan based on discipline — an extremely uncomfortable proposition for a hypercompetitive athlete constantly attempting to shed his “injury-prone” label — would be as significant of a development for the Sixers’ championship hopes as any trade or signing could be.
Preseason games can be valuable, especially for teams like the Sixers with revamped rosters, but they do not count for anything. What is happening now is not the true test of how seriously all parties involved are taking the challenge of getting Embiid to the playoffs healthy. The real challenge will arrive the Sixers have lost three of their last four games and five of their last seven games and have a game coming up against a very good team on the second leg of a back-to-back. The difficulty will arise when the Sixers realize that the difference in Embiid playing 32 minutes and 39 minutes in a particular game very well may determine whether or not they win a game.
My concerns will be far greater if the Sixers fail those tests — again — than they are right now.
Like it or not, the Sixers do not get to operate with the benefit of the doubt on matters like this. The reaction to Sunday’s medical update on Embiid is not fueled by concern over Embiid building chemistry with some new teammates in a preseason game or two. Rather, it is the result of fatigue stemming from yet another mad rush of media members posting a screenshot of a message with the heading “JOEL EMBIID MEDICAL UPDATE.”
Welcome back to Sixers basketball.
MORE: Joel Embiid signs a three-year contract extension with the Sixers. Can he finally get the job done?
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