The Joel Embiid Era Is Coming To An End, And Now Is The Perfect Time To Wipe The Slate Clean
David Dow. Getty Images.It's been over a decade at this point since Joel Embiid was drafted by the Philadelphia 76ers. And over those 10+ years, there has never been a more polarizing athlete to come through Philadelphia. Besides Eric Lindros, I can't think of anybody who has ever won an MVP in this city who isn't universally beloved and admired by everybody in town.
And it's not just a Philly thing, either. Joel Embiid is one of the most polarizing athletes in all of sports. You're either constantly defending Joel Embiid, or you're constantly attacking him. But considering how this past season went for the Sixers, there aren't a ton of people out there who have been rushing to defend Joel. He hasn't been on the court to show you anything that is worth fighting over. So Joel Embiid finally decided that he'd explain himself a little with this ESPN article that is 100% worth a full read.
The tough part about doing a piece like this for Joel is that so many people are always going to be quick to say he's always making excuses for himself. That this is just a PR fluff piece intended to direct blame away from himself for the way his career has gone in terms of never even playing in an Eastern Conference Finals.
But when you have so many articles being written about you that question everything about who you are not only as a basketball player, but also as a man? Well it makes sense that Joel Embiid would want to find a way to clean his slate a little heading into this season. And after reading some of the things in this article, it's actually incredible he's still even playing basketball in the first place.
There's going to come a time when Joel Embiid is no longer playing for the Sixers anymore. Whether that's because he retires, or because he ends up getting traded somewhere else, I don't think you could blame him for being thankful that it's over. Because for these past 10+ years, it's been one gigantic dysfunctional shit show. Right from the beginning with his initial rehab process during his rookie year.
ESPN -- His relationship with the 76ers unraveled. Embiid believed something was wrong with his injury, but the team brushed it off as laziness, several sources told me. Frustrated, he quit showing up to rehab and training and stopped communicating with the team.
…Hinkie, meanwhile, raced to modernize the 76ers' health and performance operation with Embiid in mind. At the start of Embiid's tenure with the 76ers, his rehab had been overseen by an intern.
The 3rd overall pick in the draft. The cornerstone piece for "The Process" rebuild. And the 76ers had an intern running his rehab process. You have this 7' tall unicorn with an untapped amount of potential, and you have some kid setting up all his rehab assignments in between getting drinks at Morgan's Pier.
But the organization not giving a shit about making sure Joel feels comfortable in his rehab process wasn't just something that was isolated to 10 years ago before they revamped the whole health team. It was still going on this past season when he had to make the decision himself to get another knee surgery.
ESPN: After months of uncertainty, false starts and recurrent swelling, Embiid couldn't take it anymore. In February, before a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, Embiid told ESPN's Lisa Salters that he would need another surgery, which reportedly surprised the organization. Morey acknowledged that surprise in our meeting.
"If you don't want to listen to me, then I have to find something else, to make sure that I'm going to be listened to," Embiid tells me. "When I told Lisa that, I think it was a cry for help. … It feels like everybody refuses to acknowledge what's actually going on."
It seems like Joel Embiid feels his entire tenure with the Sixers has been a constant battle that goes round and round in the same cycle every time. He gets injured, the team forces him to come back earlier than his body wants to let him because GMs and coaches need to keep their jobs, he comes back early because he wants to play and also feels the pressure to play, he gets injured again, and that adds extra fuel to the narrative about him being soft or fragile.
After the Knicks series, it's pretty clear that Joel Embiid doesn't think anybody in the organization actually cares about health.
He had nothing left late in games when the adrenaline wore off and the pain took hold. "I knew I only had about two quarters," he says. "My body just was, like, 'Nope, that's it.' There was nothing I could do. I shot probably, like, 10 percent in the fourth quarter."
Embiid looks back at the series with ambivalence. "In those situations, you wish some of the people upstairs kind of had your back and were like, this is not OK," he says. "You're not playing."
Now here's the thing--obviously you could look at this in a couple different ways. You could say that playing through injuries is just part of the deal you make when you're a professional athlete making hundreds of millions of dollars to play a game. And that's definitely true. But it's also hard to remember sometimes that in order to play the style of basketball that makes Joel Embiid so great, it's pretty much always setting himself up to get hurt again.
And next to his bad luck has always been this: "He's so big and he's so mobile," Caspare says. "That's two contradictory things when you jump, and land, and load, and push." Embiid is large, dense and long and yet he has traits one finds in smaller athletes: rhythm, coordination, scary fluidity. Martin compares Embiid to a semi-truck maneuvering like a Ferrari. "That's a lot of inertia," he says. "It only takes a small angulation to be a little bit off and then the joints are going to weather that abuse."
Advertisement
His brilliance sits hand in hand with his risk. We are always witnessing both.
That's been the thing about Joel Embiid this whole time. Everyone knows that there was only going to be a tiny window when the Sixers would be able to take advantage of his prime. A big man who moves like that isn't built to last a lifetime in the league. His body is eventually going to give out, and he's just not going to have the ability to completely take over games the way he once did. Which is why you'd think the Sixers would want to give him every opportunity to succeed when he's actually on the court and healthy.
Instead, the Sixers front office has been the most dysfunctional group in the league year after year. There have been so many different superstars to come and go on this roster. They've practically had to start from scratch every year.
"I hope one day someone makes a show or, whatever, writes a book about it," Embiid says of his time with the Sixers. "We went from GMs having burner accounts. And then we've had great guys that we drafted, but then again, stuff happened that no one could ever figure it out. The drama, Sam Hinkie being kicked out, bringing in the Colangelos. It's been a lot of things that have happened. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about continuity. It starts at the top."
…Embiid speaks of Harden with deep affection. He thinks the 76ers gave up too quickly on that iteration of the team. What was required after their Game 7 collapse against Boston in 2023 was tinkering in the margins, not another restart.
"I kept going back to it, the continuity," Embiid says. "When you feel like you have something, instead of building up on it, you just start over. And that's been like that every single year."
Obviously some of those decisions were out of the Sixers' hands. It's not the Sixers' fault that Markelle Fultz forgot how to shoot a basketball. It's not the Sixers' fault that Ben Simmons never bothered learned how to shoot in the first place. But they tried Jimmy Butler out for half a season before moving on. They were quick to pull the plug on the James Harden experiment. Maybe the Sixers still suck if Jimmy Butler or James Harden stuck around longer, or maybe not. But we'll never know, and that's probably what keeps Joel Embiid up at night.
At the end of the day, Joel Embiid is far from being without blame with the way things have worked out during his time in Philly. But it's hard not to think about what his career would have looked like at this point if he didn't end up with the most dysfunctional organization in basketball. It's been decade long circus filled with every shit show storyline you could think of. It's tough to find anybody who would actually be able to win here. There have been plenty of greats who have tried and failed, it's not just Joel Embiid.
Maybe it happens, but it's most likely that it won't. It's probably time for everybody to just start bracing themselves that we're close to watching the end, and that this story probably isn't going to wrap up the way we all wanted it to. Come to terms with that realization now and maybe you'll be able to at least enjoy what remaining time we have with Embiid.