Unserious Sixers cut right to the ridiculousness, insist Joel Embiid’s season-opener absence is all in The Plan

The thing about the Sixers’ unique brand of ridiculousness is that they usually introduce it gradually. That’s an important point to consider as you ponder the ridiculousness that was on display Tuesday afternoon. As crazy as the Sixers are — and they are quite crazy — they usually wait at least a month or two before arriving at a place that most functional organizations would qualify as unserious. In fact, their ability to establish this introductory period of sanity each year is the biggest contributor to whatever relevance they’ve managed to retain seven years into history’s most purposeful trek to nowhere.

Point is, crazy feels a lot crazier when you go full crazy from the jump rather than establish a baseline of normalcy and then steadily deviate from it. That’s what the Sixers did on Tuesday afternoon when they 1) announced that their star center would be joining their star forward in not participating in the first home game of the season and then, 2) acted surprised that people would not simply accept it as a totally normal and unremarkable turn of events.

“They’re evaluating them here as we go,” Sixers head coach Nick Nurse said. “As soon as we can get them out there and get them scrimmaging and get them ramped up, we’ll then get them in.”

Oh, ok, cool. Keep us posted. We’ll be the suckers sitting in the seats you sold us while claiming that Joel Embiid, Paul George and Tyrese Maxey would be playing in their first game together en route to that long-awaited NBA Finals.

Babe, get my K.J. Martin jersey! Things are going according to plan!

Embiid is the critical figure here, obviously. George won’t be in the lineup for Wednesday’s season-opener against the Bucks because of a hyperextended knee he suffered in a preseason game against the Hawks. That makes plenty of sense. As for Embiid? All is well, apparently. He just isn’t playing. Nor will he be playing for the rest of the opening week.

“Listen, I think that we’re being really smart and sticking with the plan with Joel,” Nurse said. “PG, him not playing was certainly not part of the plan. He had an injury in the game, so we’re managing that now. Absolutely, I respect how good both conferences are ... going out there and winning ballgames is going to be a challenge, not only for us but for everybody every night. We’ve got some depth and we’ve got some experience and we’ve got some good players and we’re going to go out there and see what we look like.”

Now, to be fair to the Sixers, there really isn’t anything remarkable about Embiid missing a game under mysterious circumstances. What’s remarkable is that Embiid will be missing the first game of the season. And not just any season, but a season where he and George are supposed to give the Sixers’ their best chance at an NBA Finals since the early 2000’s. But the truly remarkable part is that the Sixers didn’t feel the need to offer a coherent explanation why Embiid isn’t playing.

In doing so, they broke with their long October tradition of at least trying to pretend that this year is going to be different from all the rest. They’ve had years where Embiid misses three of the first six games (2019-20), or eight of the first 20 (2022-23), or almost all of November (2021-22). But he is always there for Game 1, and with him comes the promise that things might actually go according to plan.

For all of the ups and downs of the past seven years, for all of the familiarity that eventually settles in, the Sixers’ have always managed to begin the season the same way most normal NBA organizations do. You know, with hope. Autumn arrives and everybody jumps into the saucepan and convinces themselves that the water sure feels nice. When the star center misses a game, it’s only a game, until it’s not, at which point it no longer matters, because it’s one day closer to when he’ll return. And he will return. Trust us. Just don’t ask us when. Whenever he does, the Sixers will return to the team that was promised, the team you’ve already glimpsed. And by the time you wise up, the Eastern Conference semifinals will be here, and then it’ll be summertime. Anyway, thanks for all your support. See you next year.

Maybe Tuesday afternoon was our fault, then. Maybe we’ve spent so many years resigning ourselves to the ridiculousness that the Sixers assumed we’d become co-conspirators in it. Maybe they really thought they could stage the era’s most anticipated season opener without the two players most responsible for that anticipation and everybody with tickets would simply shrug. Maybe they really thought everybody would ignore two seemingly irreconcilable pronouncements: that Embiid wouldn’t be playing, and that it was all part of the plan.

» READ MORE: The Sixers have big plans for the 2024-25 season — but they’ll make sacrifices along the way

The Plan.

Nurse invoked the phrase no fewer than five times on Tuesday afternoon when attempting to answer all the questions that any reasonable person would ask.

Is everything OK with Embiid’s surgically repaired knee?

Was there a setback at some point while participating in training camp?

Is he struggling to recover from his participation in the Olympics?

Has he registered as a conscientious objector?

“There’s been no setbacks,” Nurse said. “Again, he’s really active. He’s lost some weight. He’s out on the court, etcetera, Just kind of making sure we’re sticking with our plan of making sure we’re getting him in a really, really good place before we get him playing live.”

None of this is Nurse’s fault, to be clear. He just happened to be the guy the Sixers trotted out there to explain something that apparently has no explanation. That, right there, is the organizational failure.

The problem isn’t that Embiid isn’t ready to play in the season opener more than five months after he played a full playoff series, more than two months after he played a full Olympics, and more than three weeks after the Sixers began a training camp in which he (reportedly) participated in everything except live scrimmages. The problem is that the Sixers don’t feel like they owe their paying customers a good-faith attempt at disclosure.

For 10 minutes on Tuesday, reporters tried to pin down Nurse on the official explanation for Embiid’s absence. The tenor of the back-and-forth was more incredulous than adversarial.

“This is getting him to where he needs to be to get him on the court,” Nurse said.

But why?

Assuming everybody involved is a rational actor, there is clearly some sensible explanation for why Embiid is not currently where he needs to be to get on the court.

» READ MORE: Call him Dr. P: Paul George has a prescription for a healthy Joel Embiid

One potential explanation is that there is some sort of acute problem in his surgically repaired left knee. He simply isn’t healthy enough to play. All of the available evidence suggests that isn’t the case. The knee did not appear to be limiting Embiid on Tuesday as he ran through half-court drills with George and a squadron of assistant coaches after practice. His teammates have talked as if his return is imminent, based on their firsthand observations of how he is moving.

A second potential explanation is that Embiid doesn’t feel like he is in game shape, and that his standards are high in that regard given the vulnerability of his knee. Most summers, he has four months to rest and recover and ramp up before the start of the next season. This year, he had half of that, thanks to the Olympics.

What does not make sense is why the Sixers would not simply say that. If they are allowing Embiid to dictate the flow of information, then perhaps the employee-employer relationship should be reevaluated, particularly in the wake of the decision to give him a three-year, $193 million contract extension.

Explanations only work if they make sense. If Embiid is missing the season opener, and the Sixers are simply abiding by their plan, and nothing about that plan has changed since its inception, then the logical conclusion is that the plan all along was for him to miss the season opener.

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Nurse said. “He’s in practice. He’s looking good. He’s progressing. He’s not quite ready yet. He’ll be ready pretty soon. I don’t know what else to say to you.”

That makes all of us.

The Sixers open their season Wednesday night against the Milwaukee Bucks at the Wells Fargo Center. Join Keith Pompey and Gina Mizell at 3 p.m. on inquirer.com/gamedaycentral as they preview the game, and the season ahead.