What are Joel Embiid’s options? A doctor explains how he could approach lateral meniscus surgery.
The Sixers star will likely opt for a partial meniscectomy or meniscal repair. Which direction he goes will determine whether he will return this season.
Which procedure best addresses the injury to the lateral meniscus in Joel Embiid’s left knee? How long will the 76ers star be sidelined? And will the big man’s health ever return to 100 percent?
The Sixers will have better answers after the seven-time All-Star center undergoes surgery this week.
Embiid has been diagnosed with a displaced flap of the meniscus, the Athletic reported. The lateral meniscus is cartilage that acts as a shock absorber and stabilizes the knee.
This will be the second meniscus surgery in his left knee. An MRI revealed a torn meniscus in March 2017. As a result, he played in just 31 games that season. Embiid missed 15 consecutive games before deciding to undergo surgery.
» READ MORE: Sixers’ Joel Embiid will have knee surgery this week. He’s expected to be out for an extended period.
“I think it’s a smart decision that he’s taking care of it now rather than kind of seeing where it goes through the season, especially if it is a flap tear,” said Dr. Meghan Bishop, a sports medicine surgeon at Rothman Orthopaedic Institute.
“Those can linger and continue to cause symptoms, potentially locking,” said Bishop, who has not examined Embiid’s knee. “So it’s something that it’s smart to get done with now. So it doesn’t linger, causing a locking problem.”
Bishop said there are two types of procedures the reigning MVP could have performed: a partial meniscectomy or meniscal repair.
With a partial meniscectomy, the surgeon would arthroscopically remove a piece of the meniscus.
A meniscal flap tear,she said, would be kind of a loose piece of meniscus that could potentially lock or displace inside the knee. So the idea of meniscectomy would be to remove that front flap back to a stable edge so that it wouldn’t catch or lock or cause him further symptoms.”
Bishop said the recovery time for this procedure is around four to six weeks, meaning Embiid could be able to play late next month.
A repair, though, would require sutures and anchors to mend the meniscal tissue and, thus, a much longer rehabilitation period. This procedure is better for the knee long term because it saves more tissue.
“If you do the repair, you need to get the tissue to heal,” Bishop said. “You fix that together. Usually that involves a period of non-weight bearing or protective weight-bearing in a brace for about six weeks, and then for return to sport is generally around four months.”
Under that scenario, Embiid would miss the remainder of the season.
» READ MORE: Sixers will need collective effort to ‘hold down the fort’ as Joel Embiid recovers from meniscus injury
Though repairing is the better long-term option, Embiid could still tear the meniscus, especially if it doesn’t fully heal.
As a result, Bishop says, doctors will typically look at the tissue to see whether it’s repairable and decide during the procedure.
“If it doesn’t look like it’s going to heal, there’s not really a point to try to repair it,” she said, “because he could end up in the same place a few months down the line if it does not heal.”