Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Protecting Embiid’s promise a delicate dance
Joel Embiid had a single band of tape around his injured left knee Saturday as he walked through a crowd and onto the Wells Fargo Center floor to do a little shooting. The earlyarriving fans cheered and hollered and smiled and reached for his hand. To some extent, at that moment, at that sighting, their night had been fulfilled.
That’s what it has come to with Embiid, the special 76ers center, a possible Rookie of the Year, a hero to those convinced that nothing that happens on any particular game night matters, just as long as there is
promise of better times ahead. He has become a symbol, a hero, a misunderstood figure ever tormented by circumstance.
To many, he can do nothing wrong. Indeed, he could even go dancing, shirtless, in public, on the same arena floor, at a concert the night before he would again be scratched from a basketball game.
That’s what happened, and since it’s 2017, it happened on video. Embiid attended a musical show featuring Meek Mill, a devoted Sixers fan often introduced on the big screen from his expensive seats. And despite missing eight games with a bone bruise in his knee, and though he would miss a ninth Saturday night against the Miami Heat, he would be so overcome with joy that he would go onto the stage and perform what loosely could be characterized as the Mummers Strut.
Party time around there.
Party time? “I’m aware,” Brett Brown said, before the game, a touch more edgy than usual, tiring of the topic. “We spoke about it. We spoke a lot about it. It’s something that is a private conversation. But we talk a lot about a lot, on court, off court, all that stuff. I enjoy talking to our young guys.”
He talks to them about basketball, and about the Sixers’ long-term plans for success. And he evidently talked to Embiid about the optics of making a scene even while the Sixers’ sports scientists have been slapping limits on his physical activities. That Brown would decline to share his talk with Embiid suggested he was not particularly thrilled with his center’s use the Wells Fargo Center event floor for something other than – what is the word? - basketball.
But that’s where Brown has been, this season and for the past two, ever trapped by cameras and sports writers and being asked to explain why the No. 3 overall pick in the 2014 draft is not available. Until Saturday, he generally handled it with poise. It’s the unwritten agreement that has helped him keep one of the 30 more prized head-coaching jobs in his industry despite a horrifying record; he will front for all the schemes and do it with a smile. Yet it appears, at least, he was tiring of the act.
The Sixers cannot keep their stories in order. First, they said Embiid had a bruised knee. Then, Embiid said the knee was hyperextended. Then all agreed it was a bone bruise, suggesting a greater danger of a fracture. But by Saturday night, there was team president Bryan Colangelo acknowledging that Embiid had a slight meniscus tear in the knee, and that the Sixers have known about that for three weeks. That was revealed, Colangelo said, in an MRI conducted after Embiid’s Jan. 20 injury in a game against the Portland Trail Blazers.
Even if it is all a matter
of medical talk and that there are but subtle differences between, as Colangelo said, “a very minor” tear and a bone bruise, the Sixers are surrendering some of the transparency that they’ve been boasting of during their building process. They say one thing, then another, then another, all on the same topic.
Compounding that is Embiid, who went dancing with the stars even as the Sixers’ front office knew he had a torn knee.
“It’s not the best thing to see when you wake up on Saturday morning and you find out that was the case,” Colangelo said. “Because I know the reaction. And I understand some of the potential concern out there. But if you’ve seen what he is going through on the basketball court the last few days leading up to this path of a return to play, I’m not surprised he was able to do some of those things.”
So it wasn’t the risk of further injury that concerned Colangelo about Embiid’s public dancing, but the perception.
“If he’s healthy and can play in a basketball game, it’s one thing,” Colangelo said. “But being at the concert was not disappointing. Being on the stage and dancing was a little bit, giving the circumstances and the potential reaction. And once again, it’s understandable. But at the same time you are talking about a young man who is following the medical opinion and medical advice, and that’s what we’re doing as an organization right now.”
The Sixers rested an injured Embiid for one year, then another, and then they put him on a nightly minutes restriction in his third season, to no immediate benefit. But they will shield their eyes as he dances on stage in their home arena, and then roll him out there for some pregame shots and cheers.
Someday, he will be cleared to play.
Until then, he will be popular anyway.