Philly Front Office

For all the bullshit that constantly surrounded The Process by national media and your most annoying friends, it was never delivered with the context of luck. Professional athletes get hurt. It’s a thing everyone has to deal with. However, the ladies in charge of luck seem particularly creative (and vindictive) when it comes to the Sixers. In college, one of my friends came down with Scarlet Fever. It was incredibly weird. I don’t think that would crack the top 10 list for obscure Sixers maladies.

How Good are Those Clippers Picks for the Sixers?

I’ve been trying to find a good time all season to write this up. Granted, I could have done it at any point with Joel Embiid’s phantom “right knee injury management” considering they never actually named his injury, but let’s go with Paul George taking mystery medication for his mental health instead. Anyway, here are the Top 11 most obscure Sixers injuries of the last 15 years

#11 – Embiid Ironically Breaks Face on Fultz’s Shoulder

On March 28, 2018, Sixers fans were feeling great. Not only had the team won 7 games in a row (and were crushing teams) but #1 pick point guard Markelle Fultz had just returned from his phantom shoulder injury. Embiid was humming, Simmons looked unstoppable, and life was good. This, as every Philly fan knows, is when they get you. Midway through the first quarter, Embiid’s face would collide with Fultz’s long injured shoulder on a screen, fracturing Embiid’s orbital bone. Of course it did. Obviously, injuries happen, but to lose our oft-injured star to a collision WITH THAT SHOULDER in his second game back was particularly outrageous. The team would win 16 in a row, and we did get the Phantom of the Process mask, but Embiid was not at 100% for the playoffs.

#10 – Embiid 2024 Miscellany

When Embiid scored 70 points against Wemby and the Spurs, we should have all known some evil lurked around the corner. Just 8 days later, Jonathan Kuminga fell on Embiid’s leg and nothing was the same again. He missed time, came back for a crippled playoff run, played poorly in the Olympics (save for a medal saving run against Jokic and Serbia), then looked like a shell of himself in the following lost season. He claimed he needed surgery, the team claimed he just needed to take care of himself, hope was lost. The compromise was a minor surgery and a better diet/fitness plan. Miraculously, it seems to have worked.

#9 – Ben Simmons Sadness/Non-Believable Injuries

I don’t know if we’ll ever have a believable narrative about Ben Simmons. At one point in 2020, he did have a back injury. However, what afflicted him in 2021-22 pretty clearly wasn’t that. During the Hawks series, something happened within him that made him retreat when things got difficult. How that series ended only made things worse. Instead of admitting he had lost confidence, maybe because Doc Rivers and Joel Embiid didn’t support him, he doubled down on excuses. He refused to play. Eventually he was traded, released, and is now out of the NBA. He claimed a back injury and even had surgery. Anyone who watched that Hawks series though knows he became terrified of basketball. I often try to sympathize with him, but one thing always comes back to me. There is not a single person who has met Simmons that has a nice thing to say about him.

Worst Philly Losses of the Last 30 Years

#8 – Embiid Navicular Bone #2

Getting an injured big man at #3 in the draft was fine, maybe even ideal. After all, if we were bad one more year, that’s one more good draft pick. The strategy looked especially sage when videos of Joel Embiid throwing down dunks between his legs in the layup line made us all salivate over his potential. He said he felt great and he looked even better. That’s why it was so crushing when on June 13, 2015, it was reported that his broken navicular bone was not healing correctly and would require a second surgery. HOW COULD IT BE BROKEN IF HE WAS DUNKING BETWEEN HIS LEGS??? Surgery would be performed and he would miss a second full season.

#7 – Embiid Broken Face #2

One broken face? It happens. Two broken faces? Well, I guess that happens too. On April 28, 2022, the Sixers were finishing up their first round playoff series against the Raptors, blowing them out in Game 6. For some reason, and despite the game already being well in hand, Embiid was still in the game late in the 4th quarter. The Raptors did not take kindly to this. Pascal Siakam drove to the basket, leading with his elbow, and struck Embiid in the face causing another orbital bone fracture. After the game, Siakam expressed remorse, but he has had previous cheap shot run-ins with Embiid. I’ve always been dubious of that PS. The real killer is that Embiid would miss the first two games of the next series against the Heat. The Sixers lost both and then lost the series in 6 games. If only Pascal could handle the pressure.¹

#6 – Kelly Oubre Hit by Car, Maybe

On November 11, 2023, Oubre suffered a broken rib and other minor injuries while walking outside his Center City residence. He claimed he was hit by a car. Everyone gushed sympathy and we consoled ourselves with mutterings of “of course” and “only the Sixers.” What an unlucky situation! Strangely though, the police didn’t find any evidence that he was actually struck by a vehicle. No cameras picked up the incident and nothing was found at the alleged scene. No one was ever charged. It’s still not clear if he was ever actually hit by a car or what happened that night. He would miss 11 games.

#5 – Paul George Mallet Finger

Paul George was not good in his first season as a Sixer. It started bad and it never got right. He was afflicted by several injuries during the season, but the most interesting was the never confirmed “mallet finger.” Mallet finger is a slight tear on the tendon of a finger that does not allow you to extend it. The problem is that there is nothing you can really do about it except not use it. Apparently, the only treatment isn’t surgery or therapy, it is just having your finger in a splint and not used for weeks. Obviously. that’s something that isn’t great for a basketball player. Wonderful.

Thank You Paul George!

#4 – Andrew Bynum Bowling

It’s not Andrew Bynum’s fault that he was injured and hated basketball when the Sixers traded for him in 2012, but he never seemed very motivated to get back to playing. The injury that the Sixers dismissed turned out to be arthritis in both knees. Then it turned into a bone bruise. No one really knew what was going on, only that Bynum wasn’t playing. On November 17th, 2012 it was announced that he had a setback and the setback occurred while bowling. Yes, bowling. It was never said what happened bowling, but bowling was the final straw amongst Sixers fans (and probably management too). Now it was considered a “weakened cartilage state.” The Sixers finally announced that his knees had become significantly worse since he joined the team. He would never play a minute for the Sixers who at least thankfully did not immediately give him a contract extension.

#3 – Embiid Bells Palsy

This one seems to have been swept under the rug and forgotten by most. During the 2024 playoffs, when Embiid was already dealing with his degenerative knee condition, he also suffered a random bout with Bell’s Palsy. This is a temporary paralysis of the face that also causes light sensitivity and speech problems. Embiid not only played through this. but scored 50 points against the Knicks. Despite this and the knee, Embiid was killed by the press for not winning. That’s when I realized how gross it was that so many were seemingly lusting at his misfortune. It was apparently more important to excoriate Embiid than realize and sympathize with his awful health luck.

#2 – Zhaire Smith Broken Foot into Near-Death Sesame Allergy

Zhaire Smith’s biography is unfortunately way more interesting for everything that went wrong off the court than anything done with a ball in his hands. We all first remember the draft day trade that sent him here along with a future first round pick for local boy and future star Mikal Bridges. We all wish it ended there. Unfortunately, on August 6, 2018 he suffered the traditional Sixers rookie broken foot. That’s bad, but after Embiid and Ben Simmons, we were used to this. What we are not used to is previously unknown sesame allergies that cause a player’s body reject them. After eating dinner Thai chicken, Smith swelled up and broke out into hives. He would end up spending 6 weeks in the hospital and lost 60 pounds. He would eventually recover and play sparingly for the Sixers before being traded. He’s currently in the GLeague.

Darkest Timeline Excerpt: What if the Sixers Traded for James Harden Instead of Andrew Bynum?

And the #1 most obscure Sixers injury is…Markelle Fultz. All of it.

Could anything else be #1? We still don’t know what, if anything, happened to Markelle Fultz. Did he have thoracic outlet syndrome, a scapular muscle imbalance, was it mental, did he fall off a motorcycle? What we do know is that he was able to shoot in college but by the time the preseason started, he couldn’t anymore. After 4 games, he was shutdown. Then some 68 games later, he returned. There was no surgery, no therapy, and nothing changed. He never shot well again though. It didn’t end there.

The following season, Fultz was named the starter then demoted once the team traded for Jimmy Butler. At that point, Fultz withdrew from the team. His agent claimed that he would not play again until a diagnosis was given to the shooting woes/shoulder injury. Lots of blame went around from the Sixers, to his family, to his trainers; it was all very strange. He was eventually traded to the Magic. He played 33 games in 2 years for the Sixers.

He debuted the next season for the Magic and played decently, getting into 72 games and starting 60 of them. Nothing happened in between his time with each team, the issue was just forgotten. No surgery. To this day, I think about his shoulder all the time. What happened?

1. I WILL NOT BE APOLOGIZING FOR THIS SCIENCE JOKE ↩︎