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, one can argue that it is the single biggest factor in their astonishing ability to maintain even a shred of relevance seven years into history’s most purposeful trek to nowhere. They establish a baseline of normalcy before steadily deviating from it, confident that nobody will notice or, if somebody does, that any explanation will suffice so long as it is delivered with a straight face.

See, with the Sixers, crazy is a boil-the-frog kind of end-state. The season begins the same way it does in most normal NBA organizations. You know, with hope. With a belief that, this time around, things really are going to work out according to plan. October 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 and say, “Oh, OK, cool.”

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Babe, find my Andre Drummond jersey! Everything is going according to plan!

The Plan.

Nick 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 when informed that Joel Embiid would not be participating in the Sixers’ season opener.

Is everything OK with his 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.”

Now, to a lot of Sixers fans, particularly those who shelled out money for a ticket to Wednesday’s season opener at the Wells Fargo Center, a “really, really good place” for Embiid to play live would be the first game of the season against a Bucks team that counts itself among the large handful of Eastern Conference title contenders. That’s especially true given the absence of Paul George, the oft-injured 34-year-old veteran who almost made it through an entire preseason before hyperextending a knee and being ruled out for at least the first week of the season. The official word from the team is that George will be reevaluated this weekend. Which, well, won’t we all?

“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.”

That’s some T-shirt-worthy material, right there.

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.

I‘m not trying to go full Ralph Nader here. Given the Sixers’ history, this is not an ideal way to sell a season.

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.

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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.