Philly Front Office

We are now in the All-Star break in which the Sixers had no All-Stars. The team is 20-34 and tied for the 6th worst record in the league. Joel Embiid plays sometimes and seems to disagree with the team about his injury treatment options. Paul George has made his mark on the Sixers by vaulting to the top of the obscure injury list with “mallet finger.” That’s obviously not a compliment, but it is much more of an achievement than anything he has done on the court. The team is listless, lazy, and just about the biggest chore “entertainment” could possibly be. In the immortal words of Dennis Miller in Joe Dirt “to give a little backstory, you were covered in crap and are a complete loser.” I figure that describes both the team and my fandom.

It’s easy to bemoan the Sixers and yell “what are we doing” at every box score. Wait a second, that’s a good question! What the hell is this team doing? They seem like a complete mess in the front office, on the court, and in their messaging to the fans. How did we get here? It’s easy to blame injuries and bad luck, but that doesn’t fully explain how this team is so completely fucked.

Let’s start with leadership. It might be cliche to say leadership starts at the top but it’s not wrong. There is exactly one person who has the final say for everything in this organization, the owner Josh Harris (I guess Blitzer too, but no one ever sees him). Now this isn’t about his shiny new toy in Washington or how he just took the city on an arena ride over the last two years, it’s about him seeing what is going on and being fine with it. He established himself as spineless and aloof early on during the Hinkie years.

Despite knowing exactly what the plan of the Process was, Harris basically castrated Hinkie after starting the 2015-16 season 0-18. I am not trying to relitigate Hinkie here. I want you to see that Harris was still in on the tank plan that season until the record bad start. He just didn’t want people to see him as that bad. 0-18 was too much, but 3-15 would have been…fine? Does that make any sense? The league made him feel uncomfortable, so he brought in the Colangelos. That’s the kind of man who is in charge of this team. He has to be publicly shamed or privately threatened to do anything.

The person Harris hired to oversee the team is GM Daryl Morey. I have generally defended his moves and even liked his most recent off season, but he has a fatal flaw. He values stars over the rest of the team. This creates an “us” and “them” dynamic that Daryl doesn’t see as a problem. In Houston, he allowed James Harden to run wild on and off the court because he was the focal point of the team. He was allowed to miss practice, take private planes, and do what he wanted. On the court, the entire team was focused on him and his talents because he was the team’s engine. If Harden didn’t play, the team had to make do. Luckily for them, he was always pretty healthy. The same cannot be said for Joel Embiid.

Morey was so infatuated with Harden that he even traded for him in Philly (and has a painting of him in his house). Now this deal wasn’t necessarily bad either going in or going out, but it allowed Harden’s specific behavior and treatment to be digested by Joel Embiid.

Joel Embiid took basically 3 years to fully arrive on the basketball scene. Once he did, it was pretty clear he would be in the MVP race for years to come. He was a star. What does Daryl Morey do with stars? He keeps them happy (or at least tries to). With Embiid this means absolutely no accountability for his on-court actions or his off-court work ethic.

When a player is injured, usually the national media shows some empathy. Not with Joel Embiid. He is constantly derided about his health with an unspoken understanding that people think he’s faking it (ironically, the same thing happened with Ben Simmons). Why is this? Well, it’s a few things. For one, he is regularly out of shape. You would think this is a given considering it’s usually his knees that are bothering him, but no one feels bad for an out of shape professional athlete. Second, he doesn’t have any good wins. People like winners. Winners get the benefit of the doubt, losers don’t. No showing game 7 against the Celtics? That’s loser shit. No one makes excuses for losers. Lastly, and probably most annoying, it’s the messaging. The first two years, we were told straight up that he would miss each season. It sucked, but it was definite, and it told us that he was going to heal up and get right. Since those first two seasons, the injury updates have been nothing like that. He randomly (but regularly) misses games with no warning at all. Fuck you fans who bought tickets. When he’s actually hurt, we get his greatest hits album: falls during game, finishes game, misses next 2 games, plays next game, misses next game, no update, misses next game, no update, obscure technical injury is announced and “will be re-evaluated in two weeks”, misses several weeks, “may need surgery” in the off season? THAT’S HAPPENED HALF A DOZEN TIMES!

Just in the last 2 weeks we heard Daryl say 10 doctors believed Joel Embiid was improving and will return to full strength. Then Joel tells a reporter that he likely needs surgery that will require a lengthy recovery. He’s talking about the Lonzo Ball surgery! Those two forecasts are COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!! What are we supposed to do with that? Why can’t they just tell us he’s hurt? Why must it be secretive? Why must it be noncommittal? Why is it contradictory? It’s maddening.

The team employs trainers and has access to the best doctors in the world. Are you telling me they just don’t know? If that’s true, then they should have been fired years ago. I’m not buying it. No other team has these issues despite presumably using the same globally recognized physicians. So, if it isn’t the doctors, then its purposely coming from the team this way. Their messaging is like UPS destroying your package in transit. Why? Because Joel Embiid wants it this way. Instead of listening to professionals, Morey is basically allowing Joel Embiid to dictate his own injury messaging and course of action.

All of this feels silly. He either needs surgery or he doesn’t. He will either get better or he won’t. Keeping everyone in the dark is awful for the fans and even worse for his teammates. How can they not resent him at this point? He has played 17 of 54 games this year. It seems they are just as in the dark as we are as to his daily availability. When he does play, he is out of shape, lazy on the court, and yelling at teammates. How are they supposed to prepare not knowing if he is going to play? Even if he does play, there’s no guarantee he is going to try.

If a doctor says he should be out for 4 weeks and should follow a certain program to get back into playing shape, he needs to do this. They need to stop allowing Joel to set his own schedule. EVERYONE would rather him miss a certain amount of time than play once per week. He gets our hopes up but he’s not getting any better. If surgery is recommended, get the surgery now!!!

Let’s not forget about him being allowed to show up out of shape every training camp. I don’t know if it’s his diet or he barely moves, but it is a problem that has seemingly never been addressed. Carrying an extra 40 pounds on those knees half the year is not helping anything. Can we get some yoga and a Peloton in his life? A personal chef? It’s every year and no changes. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

The lack of transparency, the regular disappearing act, and never learning from past mistakes has made me hate him. I’m not mad when’s he’s hurt and out for the season, I’m mad when he is scratched right before tipoff. I’m mad when he plays hurt and misses more games. I’m mad when he does play and he’s not trying. I’m mad when he plays and he’s out of shape. I’m mad when he comes back too soon and gets reinjured. I’m mad when I’m told he is “ramping up” only to not play. I’m mad that he needs to “ramp up” from an ailment that was never mentioned. I’m mad when I’m not given any information. I’m mad when I am given information that is clearly not true. I’m mad when we have no ability to field a competitive team when our star is a giant question mark. I’m just mad at this team.

Joel has become a sad, entitled a-hole. He is probably very depressed about his situation and thinks he’s doing the right thing by trying to play. He needs to be told to stop making things worse and alienating teammates and fans. No one will say this to him though because Daryl Morey has never and will never tell a star the word “no.” Joel will be allowed to continue with this bullshit for the next 5 years at least. Oh yeah, forgot about that. The team signed him to an early massive extension in the offseason despite his injury situation. They didn’t want to make Joel unhappy. Wait what??? They claim they consulted doctors about his knee, and it was given a vote of confidence. Well apparently, Joel himself didn’t get that memo. So again, they either have bad doctors (they don’t) or the doctors were ignored and we are being lied to. I don’t see any other possibility.

This season from hell has its Joel Embiid problem, but I haven’t even gotten into Paul George playing with one hand, the team completely bailing on the coach, the awful trade deadline, and refusing to do anything to get in better draft position. It’s been a total mess. They seemed to be completely blindsided by Embiid being unavailable despite that being very obvious from as far back as the Olympics and definitely by the first day of training camp. They had a flimsy Plan A and just allowed the season to go berserk because they had no Plan B.

So, why has this happened? I keep coming back to Josh Harris being spineless. He can’t heal Embiid himself but he can stop the day-to-day messaging insanity. He can’t make the team win or lose, but he could have made Morey pick a lane at the trade deadline. He can’t guarantee a player’s emotions, but he didn’t have to okay an early $200m extension to a guy with bad knees. He has just allowed this team to go completely off the rails. The only thing he has done in the last few years is mandate that the team get below the luxury tax. That’s it. As long as he isn’t paying the tax, he is fine with it being a total shitshow.

The Philadelphia Eagles are easily the best team in the city and one of the best franchises in all of sports. The Sixers are the opposite. Where the Eagles have a fundamental team building identity of consistently fortifying the trenches, the Sixers rely almost entirely based on hope. The Eagles invest in quality individuals who preach accountability. The Sixers cater to stars and allow them to run the asylum. One is the gold standard; the other is simply not a serious organization.