One NBA story we won’t have to worry about anymore this season is when Joel Embiid will be healthy for the Philadelphia 76ers. Last week, the team announced they are shutting him down for the rest of the 2024-25 season to rehab his left knee after he was limited to just 19 games.
It’s been a rollercoaster for Embiid, who missed the first nine games of the season, had his debut delayed after he was suspended for shoving a columnist, and he never played in more than four consecutive games.
The 76ers are also 21-40 through 61 games, including an 8-11 record when Embiid played. So, the NBA playoffs likely weren’t in their future this season anyway if you’ve checked the NBA odds for the Finals.
But anything feels possible in the NBA right now after the shocking Luka Doncic trade to the Los Angeles Lakers last month. If the Mavericks were willing to let go of one of the best players in the league, one of the best starts to a career in NBA history, and move a player who took them to the Finals before his 26th birthday, then no one’s job is safe.
That’s why in the offseason, the 76ers need to pull the plug on “The Process” they started over a decade ago and trade Joel Embiid for the best offer they can get.
It’s time. They waited patiently after using the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NBA draft on him, but Embiid’s best days are likely behind him, and it never even resulted in one appearance in the Eastern Conference Finals, a historic lack of success for an NBA MVP as we’ll explain below.
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Too Many Injuries for Embiid
If you said Joel Embiid was never 100% since Day 1 for the 76ers, you would be correct. In fact, his durability problems go back to his lone year of college basketball at Kansas (2013-14) when a stress fracture in his back kept him from playing in the Big 12 tournament and NCAA tournament that year.
In the very week he was drafted by the 76ers in 2014, he had just undergone surgery on a broken navicular bone in his foot. The team still drafted him despite a recovery period of 4-to-6 months, but Embiid ended up missing the entire 2014-15 season. Then after a setback in his recovery led to a second operation, he missed the entire 2015-16 season as well.
So, technically, we are in Year 11 of Embiid’s career with the 76ers. In 5-of-11 years, he played in fewer than 40 regular-season games. In 7-of-11 seasons, he didn’t play more than 51 games. He’s never played more than 68 games in a season in his career.
When you add it all together, Embiid has played 452 regular-season games in his career, but he will have missed 431 games (48.8%) in the regular season in that same time.
That’s a staggering amount that does not even include the postseason, where we know Embiid has missed eight games, affecting five different postseason runs for his 76ers. Incredibly, he didn’t miss a game last year despite coming down awkwardly in Game 1 on a play where he needlessly put himself at risk.
But sometimes you can play through injury and still hurt your team if your play is affected by it. You can say that happened to Embiid a bit in the first-round loss against the Knicks last year, and you can definitely say health problems plagued him in his 19 games this season as he averaged career worsts in FG% (.444), 3P% (.299), blocks per game (0.9), and he averaged just 23.8 points per game after he was above 30.0 points the last three seasons.
Remember, we aren’t talking about a “what could have been” talent here. Embiid averages 27.7 points per game for his career, which ranks No. 4 in NBA history. Embiid’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is 28.3, which if he qualified with enough games played, he would rank second in NBA history behind only Nikola Jokic (28.48).
You may not love his playing style, and personally, I have never been a fan. I’ve probably called him a “free throw merchant” before on Twitter. But Embiid is a superstar with big production throughout his career. He just doesn’t play as often as you’d like, and some say the best ability is availability.
The sad truth is that chronic knee problems are unlikely going to get better for a big man in his 30s. Embiid turns 31 in two weeks. There are rumors that he could look into doing a special treatment that Kobe Bryant had done to extend his career five years that involved removing blood from the affected area and injecting it back into the knee as part of a serum.
Maybe that works for Embiid if he does it, but the fact is he’s gone his whole career with durability issues. They’ve tried load management, and the results are what they are.
He is who he is, and that’s the other reason the 76ers should just move on.
Embiid Is Unlikely to Ever Bring a Championship to Philly
The Philadelphia Eagles just won their second Super Bowl in their third appearance since 2017, the same year Embiid became an NBA All-Star for the first time. But while the Eagles have broken the mold in the NFC and become a consistent contender for deep playoff runs, the 76ers have been a disappointment in the NBA.
Philadelphia is on a run more like the Dallas Cowboys, the Eagles’ rivals. The Cowboys haven’t been to the NFC Championship Game since the 1995 season when they won Super Bowl XXX. Since then, Dallas has made the playoffs 13 times and never advanced past the second round.
If you think that sounds bad, then consider the 76ers. After they had a spirited run to the NBA Finals in 2001 behind Allen Iverson, they haven’t advanced past the second round (semifinals) in their last 14 playoff appearances, including seven straight years during the Embiid era.
- The 76ers have tried three head coaches for Embiid, including a couple of championship winners in Doc Rivers and Nick Nurse.
- They used a No. 1 overall pick on Ben Simmons and couldn’t make it work out.
- They had Jimmy Butler and didn’t keep him in Philly before he helped lead the Miami Heat to the NBA Finals twice in 2020 and 2023.
- They made a power move to acquire James Harden to go along with a developing scorer in Tyrese Maxey, and that wasn’t enough to get past the semifinals either.
- They thought adding Paul George this year would form a new Big 3 with Embiid and an improved Maxey, and it’s been a disastrous season so far.
Have the 76ers ever had the best roster in the NBA in the last decade? No, but it’s not like they haven’t had good teams with higher expectations than what they’ve done. It’s not like the Eastern Conference is loaded to the brim with contenders, especially after LeBron James left for the Lakers in 2018. Hell, there are only six teams with a winning record in the East right now.
The last NFL comparison I want to make is I’ve had this thing called the Five-Year Rule: No team has won its first Super Bowl by starting the same quarterback for the same head coach for more than five seasons.
Legitimate championship windows are short, and if it’s going to happen for you in your career, it usually happens rather quickly, especially after a big change like getting an elite coach or teammate.
While I have yet to find anything for the NBA as well-defined as the Five-Year Rule for quarterbacks and coaches, I will say something is wrong if you’re an NBA MVP and it’s going to take you 10-plus seasons to reach even one Conference Finals.
Embiid is the 36th player to win an MVP award in NBA history. Sure, we can argue he only won because the voters had Nikola Jokic fatigue and didn’t want to pick him again. We can add that Embiid publicly campaigned – some would say whined – for it too. But the fact is he’s in an exclusive club of MVP winners.
But you can argue that out of those 36 NBA MVP winners, Embiid has had the worst postseason success by failing to get past the second round.
You could even argue Embiid is already the greatest NBA player to never reach a Conference Finals, with respect to Pete Maravich, Bernard King, and Dominique Wilkins.
We’re even being generous and only counting Embiid’s career as nine seasons, giving him a pass for those first two years where he never played. Meanwhile, 33 of those 36 MVP winners reached the Conference Finals (or the equivalent Division Finals before expansion) in Years 1-7 of their careers.
Kevin Garnett needed Year 9 to take the Minnesota Timberwolves to the Western Conference Finals in 2003-04 after seven straight seasons of losing in the first round. You can argue he was at a disadvantage for coming straight out of high school, and his Minnesota teams weren’t quite as talented as Embiid’s 76ers. Also, Garnett only needed one season when he joined Boston in 2007-08 to go all the way to a championship.
But the fact is we know it’s going to take Embiid at least 10 playing seasons to get to even one Conference Finals. The only precedent for that for an MVP is Bob McAdoo, who got there in Year 10 as a role player for the 1981-82 Lakers, a team he joined that season and immediately won a championship with.
McAdoo was an elite scoring champion early in his career, but he didn’t play for great teams and was bounced around several franchises before a solid stint to help the Magic Johnson-era Lakers.
But that means if Embiid doesn’t get to a Conference Finals in the 2025-26 season, he’ll need at least 11 seasons to do it, the longest wait ever for an NBA MVP.
We have a graphical representation of this data for the 36 NBA MVP winners, showing the season they reached their first Conference Finals and how long it took to reach their first NBA Finals. Note that a few players never got to the NBA Finals like Derrick Rose (15 seasons) and Steve Nash (18 seasons).
As far as winning a championship goes, we know 28 of the 36 MVP winners (77.8%) eventually won a ring. Of the eight who didn’t, we know five of them reached an NBA Finals in their career:
- Charles Barkley, another 76ers great, made the NBA Finals in Year 9 of his career (1992-93), but it was his first season with the Phoenix Suns where he made an immediate impact.
- James Harden (Year 3) and Russell Westbrook (Year 4) were together with Kevin Durant on that young 2011-12 Oklahoma City Thunder team that lost to LeBron and the Miami Heat in the NBA Finals before that trio was broken up.
- The aforementioned Allen Iverson led the 76ers to the NBA Finals in his fifth season in 2000-01.
- The only MVP who needed more than nine years to reach the NBA Finals was Karl Malone, who did it in Year 12 (and 13) with the Utah Jazz in 1997. But at least Malone was in the Western Conference Finals in Year 7, unlike Embiid.
If there’s a silver lining for Embiid, it would be that eight MVP winners needed at least 10 seasons to win their first championship.
However, half of those players did it by joining a different team and immediately winning in their first year like Garnett (2007-08 Celtics), McAdoo (1981-82 Lakers), Oscar Robertson (1970-71 Bucks), and Kevin Durant (2016-17 Warriors).
That leaves just four players who needed at least a decade with their team to win a championship:
- Wes Unseld: Led the Bullets to the Finals in Year 3 but didn’t win a ring until Year 10.
- Hakeem Olajuwon: Led the Rockets to the Finals in Year 2 but didn’t win a ring until Year 10.
- David Robinson: Led the Spurs to the Western Conference Finals in Year 6, but his first NBA Finals and ring came in Year 10 soon after the team acquired Tim Duncan.
- Dirk Nowitzki: Led the Mavericks to the Finals in Year 8 but didn’t win a ring until Year 13.
Notice all of those players got further in nine years than Embiid has, but three of them came through finally in Year 10 to win it all, something the 76ers don’t feel like they’re ready to do next year.
Nowitzki is really the outlier in NBA history when it comes to a great player sticking with one team his whole career and winning a championship so late. Maybe Embiid can do the same with the 76ers, but I would bet against it.
Can the 76ers Move Embiid?
Again, after the Luka Doncic trade, anything feels possible in the NBA with trades. For Philadelphia, the process is broken, and it’s time to move on, because you don’t want to be going into the 2028-29 season with a player who is taking up a $69 million cap hit at 34 years old.
The 76ers gave Embiid a 3-year contract extension before this season worth $192.9 million. The extension doesn’t actually begin until 2026-27, and with a player option, they can control him through the 2028-29 season.
But I think it’s best if they just tank the rest of this season for a better draft pick, build around Maxey, and move Embiid for a king’s ransom if possible. There will certainly be suitors as elite scoring big men are rare in today’s game. A team like the Warriors could be interested as a last hurrah in the Steph Curry era for competing for a championship. A younger team like the Houston Rockets could also be interested.
We can rule out the Nuggets (Jokic), and Embiid might be the only MVP talent the Los Angeles Lakers don’t find themselves interested in should they want to keep Doncic and LeBron together beyond this season.
But much of the league should be fair game for Embiid. The 76ers gave him more than enough time and opportunities to prove he can be that franchise difference-maker, and it just hasn’t gotten them past the second round.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Thinking that Embiid can get it done if he just stays healthy is a tired act in Philadelphia.
Start a new process.
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