• last month
Transcript
00:00So what is the path forward for the 76ers? And I'm not talking so much
00:07about the next month and whether they should tank. Like, is there a realistic
00:10path to get Joel Embiid back to being a historically great player again and
00:14dominating, or are those days very, very unlikely to ever occur again? I would say
00:21they're unlikely only because of what we've seen recently and because every
00:26fix that has been proposed or fixed, for lack of a better word, because there
00:31isn't a fix. Like, just to be clear, and as I said, there's not there's not an
00:35acute injury here. It's that his past injuries have caused a condition that a
00:40lot of other NBA players' bodies respond differently to. You know, Dwayne Wade
00:45played with, you know, fluid in his knee a lot. He got a drain. He went back out
00:50there. But Joel is much bigger and has had much more trouble. So I would, you
00:55know, if I were to guess, I would guess that the dominant days of Joel are over.
01:00But there are a lot of different outcomes you could see. You know, you
01:03could see him never playing again, right? You could see, like, a John Wall thing
01:07where he comes back for six games and it doesn't work and then he's gone again.
01:11You could also see a world in which maybe he is a, like, a lesser player that
01:17tries to do less. You know, maybe he's a 20 or 24 minute player that is
01:22really effective. I mean, he's so skilled that I even think if his
01:28mind got there, I think he could be an effective player without having the
01:33physical, you know, abilities he's had before. But there are just so many
01:37different outcomes here and I don't think a lot of them are super positive.
01:40Is it fair to say that this is a pain tolerance thing with a guy who is not
01:46tolerant of pain? I don't think that's a fair way to propose it. I think pain
01:51tolerance is one thing, but I think it's more about his ability to pivot, right?
01:57You can see the difference. He can run straight, it seems, pretty easily,
02:02but his ability to cut and pivot and turn, I think that is just limited
02:09because it sort of buckles. He has been, you know, I think he's in some ways a
02:14complicated player to talk about because I think all of the, you know, he didn't
02:19put in the work in his body and all those things are absolutely true, but I
02:24also think he's played through a lot of pain and come back early for the sake of
02:29trying to do stuff, whether it's the broken faces or the knees or the hand or
02:34the Bell's palsy last year. So I don't necessarily think it's a pain tolerance
02:39issue. I think it's more of a, can this guy move in a way that can make him
02:45effective.