We’ve seen the best of the Sixers with Joel Embiid. What a mess. What a shame.

It is impossible to watch Joel Embiid not play meaningful basketball for the 76ers without remembering the last time he played meaningful basketball. It was last summer, at the Paris Olympics, and what stands out now, in the hindsight of his and the Sixers’ miserable season, is not just how he played but what he said.

Embiid’s performance in Paris was up and down, ranging from the heights of his terrific and timely second-half excellence against Serbia in the semifinals to the low point of his spending an entire group-phase game against South Sudan on the bench. There were two things about him, however, that remained consistent over those two weeks in France.

The first was that he never appeared to be in peak physical shape … because he wasn’t. He had undergone surgery in February to repair the meniscus in his left knee, had returned to the Sixers’ lineup in late March, and had transitioned immediately to competition with Team USA. Call him patriotic for playing through pain to win a gold medal for his adopted country. Call him selfish for failing to prepare himself properly for the Sixers’ 2024-25 season. Whatever. Even by the standard of a player whose conditioning has often been called into question, Embiid was laboring. His body wasn’t right, and it was obvious.

The second was that he spoke about himself and his role with the Sixers in a different manner than he ever had before. Embiid always had regarded himself as the franchise’s centerpiece, which, from the moment the Sixers drafted him in 2014, was the true and correct way to regard him. But on Team USA, he was just one of several superstars, and he suggested that the experience of being around LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant, among others, would make it easier for him to turn the reins of the Sixers over to Tyrese Maxey and Paul George.

“I’m loving it, especially going into next year, having Tyrese — especially Tyrese,” he said on July 30. “I really want him to take that next step and be the one to do as much as he can. Then I can be there to support, do what I have to do, and still dominate. But I really want to make sure I involve my teammates next year. So this is a great experience for me.”

» READ MORE: A Sixers move to Camden lurked until the new South Philly arena deal was struck, as more details emerge

A few days later, he said something similar: “When I go back to Philly, having some of my other guys, just learning how to take a step back and letting them do their thing and taking over when needed — that’s been something I’ve gotten from this experience.”

Taken together, those two factors have to make you wonder if Embiid and the Sixers suspected, or even knew, that this train of terrible outcomes would come rumbling down the tracks. They’re now 15-24, having lost four games in a row, and are in 11th place among the Eastern Conference’s 15 teams. Just seven teams in the entire NBA have worse records.

Embiid, who turns 31 in two months, hasn’t played in nearly two weeks, and the Sixers announced Friday, less than 24 hours after his knee swelled up following a workout, that he wouldn’t return to the lineup for another seven to 10 days at least. A single workout cost him a three-game road trip. Maybe more.

The attrition is becoming impossible to ignore. Over the 13 games that Embiid has been in the lineup this season, he has been a husk of who he used to be. He’s playing five fewer minutes a game. His shooting percentage has dropped by eight points (from 53% last season to 45% this season) and would be the worst of his nine-year career. His points per game have fallen by 10, his rebounds per game by three, his free-throw attempts per game by three. Maxey even felt compelled to call him out in a team meeting.

The Sixers didn’t have much choice in giving him that three-year, $193 million extension in September. They were never going to get value back for him in a trade, and were they just going to let him walk away next year for nothing? But that contract becomes a heavier albatross with every game he misses, every night that he happens to suit up and ends up hobbling from one end of the court to the other.

Press the Sixers on Embiid’s status and their immediate strategy for the season, and they’ll insist that shutting him down and bottoming out for the sake of a higher draft pick are non-starters. Here’s their argument: Embiid’s lingering knee issues and his more recent foot injury are such that he won’t benefit much, if at all, from rest and rehab and a fresh start in the fall. Because of a 2020 trade with Oklahoma City, they keep their first-round pick this year only if it ends up in the draft’s top six, and the chances of their ending up with one of those six — better than 26%, according to the online database Tankathon.com — are too remote to be worth pursuing.

» READ MORE: Philly native Justin Edwards shows the Sixers he’s ready to contribute

Those objections seem mere excuses, though, for a franchise enveloped by fan indifference at its home games, by public anger over its campaign for a new arena, by a strategy that not only isn’t working in the here and now but also has hamstrung the team into the future. The Sixers had their shot with Embiid.

They had it in 2019 when Kawhi Leonard’s four-bounce heartbreaker sent them home after two rounds. They had it in 2023 when they were one victory away from beating the Celtics in the conference semifinals and couldn’t meet the moment in Game 6 or 7.

They had it before they moved on from Jimmy Butler, before they bet big on George and James Harden before they used two No. 1 overall picks on players who either forgot how to shoot or never bothered to learn in the first place.

They apparently have consigned themselves now to a new stage — to stringing everyone along and hoping that his broken-down body cooperates just enough to hold people’s interest for a night here or there. We haven’t seen the last of Joel Embiid, but it’s clear now that we’ve seen the last of the best of him … and that maybe, just maybe, we should have seen this coming all along.