Embiid’s battle against sports science will benefit Sixers

WASHINGTON >> Of all the things Brett Brown has learned in threeplus years around Joel Embiid, none has been more valuable than how to accept it all.

Jog through Philadelphia at night, on a recovering knee? “Man of the people,” Brown said.

Was that tennis he was playing on film part of his prescribed recovery process? “Evidently,” Brown said.

Did he want to play more in an overtime game, literally kicking his leg in apparent protest of sports-science restrictions? Did he dance at a concert on the very Wells Fargo Center surface on which, due to injury, he was not playing basketball? Did Brown look the other way, every time?

“Not many players have that ‘maverick’ in them,” Brown was saying Wednesday night, before the Sixers’ season opener against the Washington Wizards. “It’s part of what makes Joel Joel.”

Embiid does things his way, and so does Brown. And what can make a good coach is the feel for when to allow a player to be a maverick when it’s not real comfortable to do so, for eventually it could be convenient, too. And this week, it became convenient for Brett Brown. Because this week, formally and forcefully and undeniably, Embiid went to verbal war with the Sixers’ sports-science department. And when he did, there was Brown, with that maverick on his professional side.

Brown has never said so, either out loud or in private. But he has made it clear that he would prefer that Embiid not be handcuffed by the Sixers’ panel of sports-science judges, who for the last two years have manufactured an arbitrary number of minutes that they would permit Embiid to play. Last year, with Embiid coming off two empty seasons due to a broken foot, the doctors limited him to 26 minutes a night. Eventually, they relented and made it 28. But not 29. It was 28. That was it.

With Embiid coming off a knee injury that was quite slow to heal this year, he was hit with a 16-minute limit. “Four a quarter,” he all but snarled the other day. And that could not have been Brown’s preference. As he said, “You’re talking to a greedy coach here.”

The story is trending stale. But the circumstances around it are fresh. Unlike in other years, Brown will not necessarily find his front office tolerant of doublefigure losing streaks. Unlike other years, Brown will enter the season basically with a full roster, at least by NBA standards. Markelle Fultz has something of a shoulder injury. Richaun Holmes has a broken wrist. Embiid is on the minutes limit. But for the first time in six years, there wasn’t one Sixer on Opening Night about to sit out an entire season. (Andrew Bynum did, then Nerlens Noel, then Embiid in consecutive years, then Ben Simmons last season.)

The Sixers have made their advertising slogan, “Welcome to the Moment.” On some level, they expect that moment to be fulfilling. That’s why Embiid’s unscheduled outburst Tuesday had to have been what Brown was hoping to hear. That’s because once a newly re-signed $148,000,000, 23-yearold center with MVP-level abilities began to point fingers toward the science laboratories, that war was about to end.

This is how it works in the NBA: The star players decide who coaches. The star players decide who plays. The star players might even decide who general manages. And, be crystal about it, the star players will certainly have more in-house weight than a faceless band of stethoscope jockeys.

By the time Brown emerged from the locker room for a chat with the press Wednesday, he was already beginning to walk-back the entire minute-limit issue.

“They are more like,” Brown said, “parameters.” And there it was, the first subtle retreat of a policy gone wrong.