ESPN’s Dotun Akintoye dropped a lengthy feature on Wednesday morning about Philadelphia 76ers’ star center Joel Embiid. The article hits a number of topics with some depth, from his journey to the United States to his career in the NBA and how he’s affected by it on and off the court.
Honestly, it’s a fantastic read that provides a somewhat rare insight into not only Embiid the basketball player but to Embiid the human. The 2023 NBA MVP and seven-time All-Star opened up about more than he may have
ever before in his career in the article, but one specific section stuck out to me as someone who has followed Embiid and this team for years.
One section has the center looking back on the Sixers facing the New York Knicks in the 2024 playoffs. The center had returned to the team for a playoff push just months after he underwent surgery on his left knee to address a torn meniscus. On top of that, he was visibly suffering from Bell’s palsy, causing temporary paralysis to half his face along with migraines and difficulty sleeping (due to not being able to shut one eye).
The Sixers lost the series in six games. Embiid averaged 33 points, 10.8 rebounds and 5.7 assists. He had nothing left late in games when the adrenaline wore off and the pain took hold. “I knew I only had about two quarters,” he says. “My body just was, like, ‘Nope, that’s it.’ There was nothing I could do. I shot probably, like, 10 percent in the fourth quarter.”
Embiid looks back at the series with ambivalence. “In those situations, you wish some of the people upstairs kind of had your back and were like, this is not OK,” he says. “You’re not playing.”
It is such a simple thing but it has ultimately been a huge catalyst for Embiid’s health becoming what it is today: why didn’t the Sixers’ organization stop him? Why has no one stopped him still?
Now, we have to get this out of the way. An extremely-fair question in response to these Embiid comments could be “well, then why did he participate in the 2024 Summer Olympics?”
I completely understand those asking this, and frankly wonder about the answer myself. It is fair to ask why Embiid felt that he was healthy enough to go over to Paris last summer for the Olympics if he wasn’t healthy. I can’t answer that question, but I am not in Embiid’s body knowing how he felt in those weeks leading up to the event. Maybe he felt he could genuinely handle it. Maybe he just figured it was the chance of a lifetime he couldn’t pass up.
Maybe he had just become so used to forcing himself to play through injury that he figured he could do it again in Paris.
That’s the thing. I don’t absolve Embiid of his personal responsibilities in these cases. I don’t agree with the way Embiid has been reckless with his body at times on the court. He is not a completely innocent party in any of this and that is an important consideration here.
But this is where I turn your attention to the other aspects of ESPN’s article. Read the parts that make Embiid human, not just a hooper. From a kid in Cameroon in a quiet family where “you could never really open up about anything,” to a teenager plucked from the only home he had ever known to go live with a host family in Florida to chase his basketball dreams. He was already a loner then—years before making it to the NBA.
Fast forward just a few years after playing basketball for the first time, and Embiid heard his name called No. 3 overall at the 2014 NBA Draft by the Sixers. Still alone, across the world.
Then, before he could even begin his rookie year, Embiid had to learn of the sudden, tragic death of his 13-year-old brother over the telephone, while he was across an ocean chasing his basketball dreams. That loss affects Embiid to this day to the extent that phone notifications can still startle him, so he has them constantly muted.
So, what is my point? Everyone has a sad story, right?
My point is that the Sixers should have known Embiid’s story, or at least learned and adapted to it when it made itself obvious. None of this was exactly a secret. This is a kid who was across the ocean from his family, away from people that even spoke the same language as him, for the dream of even a chance to play in this league—something very few from his country have done. With that life start and his quick entry to the league, this expectation that Embiid would be able to just stand up for himself and say “hey, I think I’m really hurt” out of the gate is damn near unrealistic.
What’s even more interesting, though, is that it sounds like a young Embiid did just that all the way back in 2014. The article cites sources claiming that the Sixers’ organization, then under Sam Hinkie, brushed off Embiid’s concerns about his injured foot at the time as “laziness”. (Sounds familiar to a narrative that has followed Embiid since, even when he enters a season leaner and stronger than he did the previous.)
Embiid had been recovering from surgery on the navicular bone of his right foot back at 20 years old.
Embiid believed something was wrong with his injury, but the team brushed it off as laziness, several sources told me. Frustrated, he quit showing up to rehab and training and stopped communicating with the team.
“I had to start being an a—hole,” Embiid says. “Whatever they asked me to do, I was, like, ‘I’m not doing it.’”
The 76ers, unsure what to do, responded by repeatedly fining him. Embiid tells me he stopped keeping track of how much he was fined that year after the amount reached $300,000. “It’s worth it,” Embiid remembers thinking. “They’re not listening to me, and I’m not going to keep putting my body at risk.”
It turned out that he had been right all along. In June 2015, Dr. Richard Ferkel, who had operated on Embiid’s foot a year before, confirmed that the foot had not healed.
So, the one time he did try to stand up for himself in defense of his health, in a situation where he was later proven right, Embiid was painted as lazy by his own organization. Perhaps it’s no wonder he hasn’t done it again.
It has only become more and more obvious to anyone that has watched him play with hobbled legs and broken face(s) since then that Embiid shifted to dragging his body onto the court if he’s allowed to, regardless of his condition. Hell, he admits it himself.
I asked [Embiid] if he was going to take steps to protect himself if others wouldn’t. He looked me in the eye and said, “We can sit here and I’ll tell you I’m changing, but I know myself. I don’t think that’s going to happen. ... I always want to play.”
“Feeding into the pressure of you got to play, got to go out there, can’t let people down and this and that,” Embiid tells me. “That’s probably one of the reasons why I’m in this position now.”
So, is he his own best advocate when it comes to his health? Clearly not. I don’t think anyone, Embiid included, would claim so.
But why was he allowed to do this repeatedly throughout the past 10 years or so? How as the Sixers organization can you absolve yourself of not protecting Embiid from himself at any point in the past decade, when he so obviously needed it from the beginning? He hasn’t exactly been subtle: he WILL go out there on a broken leg with a broken face if he is allowed to or even pressured to, regardless of if it means causing more damage to his own body in the process. He has done it time and time again.
Looking back on when Embiid surprised Lisa Salters on ESPN with the prospect of him getting another knee surgery back in February of this year, he called it “a cry for help”.
After months of uncertainty, false starts and recurrent swelling, Embiid couldn’t take it anymore. In February, before a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, Embiid told ESPN’s Lisa Salters that he would need another surgery, which reportedly surprised the organization. Morey acknowledged that surprise in our meeting.
“If you don’t want to listen to me, then I have to find something else, to make sure that I’m going to be listened to,” Embiid tells me. “When I told Lisa that, I think it was a cry for help. ... It feels like everybody refuses to acknowledge what’s actually going on.”
Starting to sound a little bit like a pattern...
For what it’s worth, we have to acknowledge the elephant in the room—or lack of elephant, really—in the secrecy of what the medical staff is actually recommending to players in these cases. We have no information on whether or not the Sixers’ team doctors told Embiid he could play or if he shouldn’t be setting foot on the floor. We also have no idea how much the Sixers’ organization even takes those medical opinions into account. Based on how secretive Embiid and the team have been to this point, we aren’t likely to find out either.
From the perspective of former Sixers’ teammate Nicholas Batum, though, Embiid’s deteriorating condition was literally visible by then.
“I was sitting next to him in the locker room,” his former teammate Nicolas Batum told me. “I saw his knee before every game, after every game.”
Batum shook his head. “I saw his knee,” he said again. “I have no idea how he could even walk.”
The bottom line is that Embiid was allowed out there time and time again, and the current state of his knee and overall health is the result. And the organization needs to answer for that.
Full disclosure, I have to admit that I am a fan of the human Joel Embiid. I am a fan of the basketball player Joel Embiid. I own that here, but I don’t consider him infallible. He doesn’t even consider himself infallible. His loner, secretive nature may mean he hasn’t always been his own best advocate when it came to speaking up for himself. He cares way too much about what the media or fans online are saying about him. He is competitive to a fault and puts his own body as risk if he is allowed. He is a flawed human.
Aren’t we all?
But if we accept that, we have to accept that the organization is flawed too. This organization failed Embiid and, as a result, failed their own team and the city. All I can hope for is that they will learn from their actions here and understand they are bringing human beings onto their team—human beings that may be young, across the world from home, lonely and scared, and who may need to be protected from themselves or just be trusted when they say something is wrong.
Embiid is now a grown man with his own responsibility in these matters as a basketball player, but it becomes more understandable when you factor in his humanity. Embiid the human: a kid who was trying to live out a dream and was not home for the death of his younger brother; who tried to tell his organization that his foot wasn’t healing and they painted him as lazy, a reputation that has stuck with him since; who still reads the headlines and maybe cares a bit too much about what they say.
Embiid the human informs the decisions of Embiid the basketball player. And if that wasn’t clear 10 years ago, then it is clear as day now. The human experiences Embiid’s had have affected his decisions as a basketball player to continue to risk his own health going out on the court when he shouldn’t be allowed to. Frankly, I don’t expect him to change now.
But who knows how things could have been a whole lot different if maybe the Sixers organization had handled Embiid, the basketball player and the human, with a little more humanity.
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