The Sixers and the NBA are struggling. Joel Butler
For many years, the Sixers’ weakest point has been injury management. Furthermore, it doesn’t seem like Nick Nurse and Daryl Morey have the greatest strategy to maintain Joel Embiid’s health. Stupid media debate and new NBA rules aren’t helping either.
devastated. Crazy. Let down. Exhausted.
The easiest way to explain it is that Joel Embiid’s floor versus Golden State was an organizational failure, as our own Paul Hudrick put it. Everyone should take responsibility for what we all saw.
When Embiid’s trainer Drew Hanlen appeared on my podcast before to the start of the season, he disclosed that, the night Joel won his MVP the previous spring, Joel said to Hanlen, “Man, to be honest with ya, I’d give back this MVP just to have a healthy postseason.”
This now.
Nothing much is known about Joel Embiid’s injury other than that he has a left meniscus tear.
Everything about it is a complete, needless, mess reminiscent of the Sixers.
Everybody is to fault. (Knuckles cracks)
When the NBA implemented the 65-game minimum requirement, they made a grave error.
Are you implying that an MVP winner who participates in 64 games may be defeated by a player who participates in 65 games? Even if the guy with the fewer gaming hours clocks more overall minutes? Fans already give a lot of weight to games played when choosing the All-NBA team and MVP.
Are you saying that this rule can force someone like Tyrese Haliburton to lose $41–$54 million? And what is it? Should he merely play while hurt in order to get around this absurdity?
What a really “dumb rule,” in the words of the Pacers All-Star
The late Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors is also understandably repulsed by Adam Silver’s new regulation, which is having disastrous consequences:
The talking heads and media surrounding the NBA just don’t conduct enough research.
Our Bryan Toporek stated this point much better than I could have the other day. The truth is that Embiid’s recent remarks and his purported “ducking” of Nikola Jokic have been utterly disgraceful.
Finding the truth about that farce of a situation simply required a little investigation on my part.
LeBron James also detected it:
In the pod below, Royster and I discussed this topic in great detail. I promise you won’t want to miss Royster take a hard stance against personalities like ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith and Kendrick Perkins for failing to complete their study.
The NBA’s networks ought to make their pundits force-feed some context and facts before letting them go on live to spew derogatory nonsense:
I feel so bad for Joel and his supporters. Embiid should take some of the “blame” in this situation as he pushed to play when he shouldn’t have and to suit up. In the end, he is writing his own legacy with this.
Indeed, we witnessed him vault into the MSG stands, participate in an All-Star game, and then miss ten games in 2019 due to knee inflammation. Indeed, we’ve heard the accounts implying that when Joel injured himself in Washington back in 2021, he might have meant to illustrate a point. This season, while pursuing 30-and-10 streaks, we’ve seen him hobble around in garbage time due to an injured knee.