As the NBA investigates, it’s the same old story for the Sixers and Joel Embiid

I was going to write a column on all of the interesting moments from last night’s Sixers season opener. But, let’s be honest. Nobody wants to read 800 words on Brickin’ for Chicken. So, instead, I’m going to hammer home a point that probably doesn’t need many more whacks.

Nights like last night? They aren’t good for anybody. Not the NBA. Not ESPN. Not Paul George. Not the Sixers. Certainly not their fans, roughly 20,000 of whom paid good money to watch what turned out to be a glorified exhibition game. The final score matters only because it offers a tidy summation of this abomination of a night. Even then, Milwaukee Bucks 124, Sixers 109 is probably understating things.

You just have to hope it will turn out to be good for Joel Embiid.

Otherwise, you know the drill.

Know Joel, know hope.

No Joel, no hope.

Same as it ever was.

In the grand scheme of things, it probably won’t matter much that the Sixers started the 2024-25 season with a loss. Nor will it matter that the loss was to the Bucks, a team that deserves more of a mention in an Eastern Conference conversation that, throughout the offseason, has focused mostly on the Celtics, Knicks, and Sixers. It may not even matter if 0-1 turns to 0-2, and 0-2 turns to 0-3, all of which will remain distinct possibilities until we get further clarity on the return dates of Embiid and George (Embiid is already expected to miss Games 2 and 3. George remains day-to-day with a hyperextended knee).

What matters is the tone that the Sixers have set for themselves. Everything was supposed to feel new, fresh, exciting, laden with potential. You looked out on the court and you saw different faces, different names, different numbers. Even in the defeat, you couldn’t help but acknowledge the legitimacy of the roster the Sixers have assembled. Caleb Martin, Guerschon Yabusele, Kyle Lowry, Kelly Oubre Jr. — these are good players who can fill solid roles on a playoff roster.

There were deficiencies, sure. A lack of quickness outside of Tyrese Maxey, a lack of knockdown shooters. The Sixers made just eight of their 31 three-point attempts against the Bucks and struggled mightily at the rim. But there was a lot to like about what you could project into the rotation the Sixers are supposed to have. Yet, therein lay the problem. They did not have the rotation they were supposed to have. Despite all of the change, everything felt disconcertingly the same.

Maxey bristled at that notion. You’d expect him to. The world looks a lot different inside of a locker room than it does from the outside.

“We played one game,” said Maxey, who tried to win the game by himself but shot just 10-for-31 from the field and 2-of-9 from three-point range while scoring 25 points. “I’m not about to sit here and say because Jo[el] was out, we played bad.

“Yes, we didn’t win the game, which is the goal, but we’ve been without Jo all preseason, all training camp for the most part. He’s been ramping up … Us winning can’t be solely on Joel Embiid. It just can’t. There’s no championship team out there — where, if Joel Embiid doesn’t play, we can’t win — like that … We will be better. I will be better.”

Just as true is that there is no championship team out there that can consistently win games when its two best players are sitting on the sidelines in street clothes. That’s what Sixers fans see. That’s what they feel when they hear that Embiid is on another one of his indefinite ramp-up periods despite not having played in an NBA game in more than five months. That’s the energy the Sixers have introduced into this season. Three quarters in, it already felt like a six-week-old Cola uncapped in the fridge.

The NBA certainly feels it. There’s a reason they let it be known that they would be launching an official investigation into the Sixers’ handling of Embiid’s absence. The league has spent a lot of energy attempting to inject life into a regular season that is quickly sliding into irrelevance. Commissioner Adam Silver surely understands that the problem cannot be solved. But optics require that he at least attempt to address it. The least he should be able to expect is for everyone to suit up on one of the league’s marquee nationally-televised nights.

Nobody should fool themselves into thinking that Silver will be putting on his consumer protector cape and fighting to avenge all of the hard-earned dollars squandered by Sixers ticket holders on Wednesday. There is something much more lucrative at stake. ESPN is paying the NBA and its owners, and by extension, its players hundreds of millions of dollars to broadcast marquee games like Bucks-Sixers should have been. When one of the star attractions doesn’t end up playing for nebulous reasons, the money feels more stolen than lost.

Those who did tune in surely did not stick around until the end. The Bucks and Sixers slopped their way through a mostly even first quarter before Milwaukee opened up a 13-point lead late in the second. The margin wasn’t threatened for the rest of the game.

The effort was there from Maxey. With five minutes left and the Sixers down 15 points, he was still hurtling through traffic, contorting his body between two bigs, flinging a max radius reverse off the backboard and watching from the hardwood as it rattled through the net. A minute later, with the Sixers down 16, he crashed hard to the court, was called for a travel, then spent much of the next 30 seconds demonstratively pleading his case to the referee in question.

No, effort will never be a problem with Maxey. Maybe that’s why he remained out there even after the aforementioned sequence, after the game was conceded and the deep subs began to check in. Maybe there was a message coming from the front of the bench to the end of it, where two superstars sat in contrasting colored sweat suits. See that guy out there? He needs you.

If that was a thought in Nurse’s mind, he would never admit it. Maxey checked out shortly thereafter, and the Sixers officially commenced counting down the seconds.

I want to try to be fair to Embiid and the Sixers here. There’s an alternate telling of this story where both player and team deserve credit that he is even in a position to be expected to star in an NBA game. Back when Embiid was 21 years old and missing his second straight NBA season, nobody would have thought he would end up averaging 50+ games over the next eight years. Nobody would have thought that, at 30 years old, he would be the kind of player whose absence causes a scandal. Whatever you think about his offseason routine, or his in-season conditioning, or his rest days, or his post-injury ramp-ups, or the decisions made by him and his team, the end result has been a player and a career that few envisioned as probable.

On a philosophical level, the process has always been sound. Perhaps Embiid’s early foot troubles were a blessing in disguise. From the moment the Sixers drafted him, they have prioritized his long-term health. That priority has recently shifted to the medium term, i.e. this year’s playoffs.

“I think if you want to point fingers at any one particular person, that’s not going to happen,” Sixers coach Nick Nurse said. “Our medical is first and foremost. Joel is there, the front office, myself, everybody is weighing in … (He’s had) very few playoffs where he’s felt very good going into them. We’re just trying to do something a little different and get him there this time.”

That is not a bad thing. The opposite, really. If the Sixers think they can trade some regular season utility for some postseason utility, it is a deal worth making.

My main point is that nobody should be demanding that the Sixers play Embiid to appease the short-term concerns of their stakeholders if their own priorities are best served by not playing him. I’m not talking about load management, here. I’m talking about load preparation, i.e. getting his body to a point where everything is maximized: cardiovascular conditioning, core strength, etc. If he can still make improvements in those departments, and if those improvements can help him navigate a basketball court in a way that better protects his knee and better prevents future injuries, then they are justified in pursuing those improvements at the expense of some early season games.

The problem is more how the last five months were handled. Embiid chose to play in the Olympics, chose to shorten his offseason by a couple of months. Playing for your country is great. Playing for your employer is life.

The Sixers chose how they relayed information about Embiid’s status. If The Plan had the potential of holding him out at the beginning of the season, they could have made that known. They could have set expectations.

Funny how something a little different can feel a lot like the same.