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This is not a defense of Brett Brown. It’s a defense of common sense.
If Brown is to be judged on the Sixers’ next 18 games, then whatever happens in the playoff series, that judgment must surely be flawed. Why?
Because Joel Embiid is hurt. Again.
If Embiid is not whole, then there can be no real judgment of what Brown can do with a full complement of talent and a respectable bench. The team’s most vocal owner, Josh Harris, fired a shot across Brown’s bow last week, but he sounded like he’d just finished reading a fan blog.
Harris was right, to a degree. For the first time in his seven-year tenure, thanks to trades that landed starters Jimmy Butler and Tobias Harris and four bench hands, Brown has enough talent and depth to go deep in the NBA playoffs. For the moment, though, he lacks his biggest star. For the foreseeable future, that star will neither be fully integrated into the Sixers’ scheme or playing at 100 percent. This will likely be true until the beginning of next season.
Embiid will miss his sixth consecutive game Tuesday, with tendinitis in his surgically repaired left knee. The team is 3-2 in the games he has missed.
Going forward, he will be limited in practices and in games due to precaution and respiration. Brown’s greatest hope of the offseason was that Embiid, uninjured for the first time in four offseasons as a professional, would finally report to training camp in shape. Whatever conditioning level Embiid had attained by mid-February, that’s gone now.
Embiid practiced Monday for the first time in 18 days. It wasn’t pretty. Logically, he will be out of shape when he returns. Unfortunately, he will be out of sorts, too.
Embiid played only four games with the Sixers’ reconstructed roster before he returned from All-Star weekend and declared himself too hurt to play. When he comes back, the Sixers will scramble to develop an offensive and defensive identity around him — an identity that most teams will have spent five months polishing.
“It’s obviously not ideal. It’s not even close to being ideal. But that’s … my job,” Brown said, resigned to reality. “To figure it out. And keep these other guys playing. Getting their own stuff as polished up as I can.”
Brown knows this, even if owner Josh Harris doesn’t. Harris told ESPN last week, “We have enough talent on our roster that if we play the way we’re capable of playing, we can beat any team in the East.” He said an early exit would be “very problematic” and that he would be “unhappy.” Which puts Brett Brown on a very hot seat.
Which is ridiculous.
Harris would have every right to be unhappy if the “talent” to which he referred was fully operable and capable to development and cohesion.
It is not. It won’t be. Not this season. Not if the centerpiece is absent or diminished.
“You hope to just get him back as soon as you can, so we can all sort of feel comfortable that we’re ready for the playoffs; that we have a clean symmetry to what you’re trying to do, defensively and offensively,” Brown said. “At the moment, that’s just not available. The ambition is to land the plane well on April the 15th and have some type of balanced approach to what we’re trying to do.”
Ask any pilot: landing is dangerous when the cargo is imbalanced.
Embiid said Saturday, “I’ll be back soon. I expect to be back by next week.” He still might be. But he won’t be the Embiid who left the team three weeks earlier.
He hasn’t had a meaningful workout since the Sixers beat the Knicks on Feb. 13. That span includes Embiid’s well-documented hi-jinks at All Star weekend, and Charlotte is renowned for its Shirley Temples. Brown seems ready to withstand at least a game or two more without Embiid, and figured it will be a long process before The Process is anywhere near the All-Star performer who averaged 27.3 points, 13.5 rebounds and 33.7 minutes, all career highs.
“He just doesn’t feel like he’s ready to go. He feels restricted with some of his movements. There’s a little bit of soreness still,” Brown said Monday. “You could see in this practice environment that he hasn’t played for a while. What I saw today in practice, you can tell he has not played basketball in a while.”
It’s impossible to overstate Embiid’s importance. He ranks fourth on the NBA’s Player Impact Estimate and ninth on ESPN’s Player Efficiency Rating, but he’s probably even more valuable than that by any measure.
So, for the fifth consecutive season, health will limit Embiid’s participation. He missed his first two seasons with a foot injury; was restricted at the start of his rookie season, then hurt a knee; was restricted early last season, then broke his orbital bone; and will be restricted when he returns from knee tendinitis, both by the chronic nature of the condition and the fact that he will not be in game shape.
He will play in fits and spurts, at least at first. His availability: game to game. The earliest he would return is Wednesday at Chicago, which would leave 18 games … but not really. The Sixers play back-to-back games twice in their last 18 games, and players nursing injuries are notorious for resting one of those nights.
“I’m going to have to be responsible with how we integrate him back, as far as the minutes that that equals,” Brown said. “We all (understand) the role he will play once he’s on the floor. None of us (are) going to guess what the minutes accumulation will be. I’m going to learn about how I’m going to play him from a rotation standpoint — what’s the tolerance of his clumps of minutes? Is it 5-minute clumps? Is it 7-minute clumps like it used to be?” Brown said.
“As it plays out, I don’t know. The wish, obviously, will be to just get him in a playing rhythm. A consistent playing rhythm. Get him his 34 minutes,” Brown said Monday, before the team predictably declared Embiid out for Tuesday’s game against the Magic. “Let him play with his team for as much as the remaining 19 games as we have.”
Make that 16 games.
At most.