Three video games is true for Joel Embiid.
A one-game suspension for the 2023 NBA Most Priceless Participant shoving a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist in a postgame incident Saturday night time would have been too mild, a slap on the wrist for placing his palms on Marcus Hayes, regardless of how incendiary Hayes’ latest columns have been, or how callous Hayes was in initially citing Embiid’s late brother in a column final month. You continue to can’t knuckle up with the media once they write or say stuff you don’t like. However 5 video games or extra would have made an excessive amount of out of what wasn’t a punch, or punches. A shove is impolite and a shock to the system, however even one from a 7-foot-2, 270-pound man doesn’t break bones or tear ligaments.
The suspension will start Wednesday in Los Angeles, the place the 76ers will play the LA Clippers. The staff had hoped that Embiid would lastly make his season debut in Steve Ballmer’s $2 billion Intuit Dome. However now, he has to take a seat out three video games, starting with the primary one for which he’s eligible and wholesome. Meaning he’d be capable to play on Nov. 12 in Philadelphia in opposition to the New York Knicks on the primary night time of the, uh, Emirates Cup.
However what isn’t resolved by the suspension is the still-smoldering dichotomy between the NBA and its groups, one made even starker because the league embarks on its new 11-year, $76 billion extravaganza of a media-rights deal that ideas off with the 2025-26 season.
Clearly, the NBA has heard the wails from its nationwide TV companions, each present and future, about marquee gamers lacking huge video games within the Tuesday by way of Friday night time home windows for video games aired by ESPN or TNT. The league was not thrilled when an ESPN story final month detailed the 76ers’ plans to carry Embiid out of back-to-back video games throughout the common season. When the league fined the staff $100,000, it stated the 76ers had been “inconsistent” of their public statements about Embiid’s readiness for the common season as he rehabbed his left knee.
Come on. It was as a result of Philly informed the reality about its plans for its famous person middle and for splash free agent signing Paul George throughout the common season: They’d be held out of at the least one finish of many of the Sixers’ back-to-backs throughout the yr.
The league has leaned, incessantly, into making the common season imply extra within the final couple of years. The league’s Participant Participation Coverage for many of the league’s high particular person awards, applied in 2023, and the, uh, Emirates Cup, had been two huge markers. However, the NBA formally opining, earlier this yr, that its personal knowledge during the last decade didn’t present load administration really prevented accidents, was the most important change. It was a 180-degree flip from its long-held, avowed place, which Silver himself continued arguing as late because the 2023 All-Star Recreation in Utah, that the league’s groups had autonomy over when and the way a lot their gamers performed, primarily based on the proprietary medical info they collected on them.
That has modified.
You ask groups across the league, and so they’ll let you know that the NBA isn’t insensitive to the concept that groups have to handle their finest gamers, together with holding out key gamers sometimes. However they must be saved within the loop. They hate being shocked.
However the league can’t have it each methods. It is aware of full nicely that its groups don’t lengthen grace to coaches and normal managers who don’t win championships or persistently make the playoffs, and particularly as increasingly groups are purchased by hardly ever affected person hedge fund homeowners and firms. A number of individuals deride Ringzz Tradition as antiquated, and but, Embiid continues to be clowned as a result of he’s by no means lifted his staff to an Jap Convention last in his eight lively seasons, a lot much less an NBA Finals. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown have been huge, huge winners in Boston since they acquired to city, however they needed to win a championship in Boston to be thought of “actual” Celtics, worthy of the staff’s profitable heritage.
Embiid has made a whole bunch of thousands and thousands of {dollars}, together with incomes a $193-million extension in September. However he’s hardly ever gotten to April and Could wholesome. One of many uncommon occasions he did, Kawhi Leonard, then enjoying in Toronto, took Embiid and the Sixers out in Recreation 7 of the 2019 Jap semis. A wholesome Kawhi then led the Raptors to their first NBA title, over Golden State.
Neither has hardly ever been as wholesome within the postseason since. Which is the purpose.
If you happen to’re Philadelphia’s mind belief, what’s extra essential: Embiid enjoying 60-70 common season video games, and getting damage – as he has, yr after yr – both late within the common season, or within the playoffs? Or giving your self the very best likelihood at a deep postseason run by holding him in bubble wrap throughout the common season? How affected person is Josh Harris going to be with Daryl Morey or Nick Nurse if the Sixers don’t advance once more as a result of Embiid is limping round in opposition to the Celtics or Knicks or Cavaliers within the second spherical?
Perceive this: Holding Embiid out of plenty of regular-season residence video games isn’t honest to 76ers followers. They’ve to purchase their tickets on religion, and most don’t have the disposable revenue to come back 10 occasions or extra throughout a season. Usually, it’s a few times a yr. Simply as I purchased tickets to see Mos Def on Broadway a couple of years in the past in “Topdog/Underdog,” solely to have him faucet out after a couple of minutes onstage with a migraine, I don’t have a solution for this. However, certainly, most Sixers followers can be simply fantastic with Embiid lacking Tuesday or Friday nights in January if it means he’s middle stage in Could and June.
Embiid is delicate, to make certain, and he at all times feels the strain of attempting to reside as much as all of “The Course of” hype. However the 76ers don’t assume he has long-term emotional points. A staff supply indicated Tuesday that the staff considered this as an remoted incident, which escalated due to what the staff felt had been “deeply private” references to Embiid’s household, together with his late youthful brother Arthur, who was killed in 2014 in a automobile accident at age 13; Embiid named his younger son after his late brother. Hayes referred to each Arthurs in his Oct. 23 column criticizing Embiid.
In that column, Hayes initially led with the paragraph, “Joel Embiid persistently factors to the start of his son, Arthur, as the key inflection level in his basketball profession. He typically says that he needs to be nice to go away a legacy for the boy named after his little brother, who tragically died in an vehicle accident when Embiid was in his first yr as a 76er. Effectively, as a way to be nice at your job, you first have to point out up for work. Embiid has been nice at simply the other.”
Hayes took that paragraph out for later editions of his column and re-wrote his lede, saying in a submit on X later within the day that he “can see why so many individuals had been upset about it. Sorry about that.”
One of the best ways for Embiid to get out of his funk, the Sixers consider, is for his or her franchise participant to, in the end, get wholesome and keep wholesome. In that sliver of house, the famous person and staff and league all share widespread hope. The when is the place the nice divide stays, and is more likely to stay, for the foreseeable future.
(Photograph of Joel Embiid: Jesse D. Garrabrant / NBAE through Getty Photos)
