A toe injury made what was already a miserable season even worse for the Sixers’ Joel Embiid insurance.
Well that’s what happens when you tell the universe your plans.
After Joel Embiid was sidelined for a significant portion of the 2023-24 season, with the Sixers going 11-18 in games he missed, he set out the following summer to recruit Andre Drummond to back him up. The hope was that Drummond would be able to scale up to starter minutes should Embiid be unavailable for an extended period of time.
It even seemed like they had built in some of those games as part of a plan to manage Embiid through the season.
Obviously everything fell apart instantly.
Embiid was never able to healthy to string together a consistent stretch of games played. Drummond did little to right the ship in that absence before being plagued with an injury of his own.
Starting in 23 of the 40 games he appeared in this season, Drummond posted his lowest rebounds per game average since his rookie season, with just 7.8 per game. He averaged 7.3 points per game on a career-low 50.6% effective field goal percentage.
Even before injuring his toe in December (perhaps out of frustration due to a temporary ejection), Drummond was a liability when he was on the floor.
Lineups with him were outscored by 16.2 points per 100 possessions, and allowed opposing teams to have a 58.7% effective field goal percentage. Both of those marks fall within just the fourth percentile in the league. Those groups allowed opponents to score 121.4 points per 100, and a lot of that boiled down to him being unable to protect the rim. His block rate also plummeted to 1.3%, another career-worst.
The toe injury was something that seriously hampered him for much of the year, and the state of the team motivating him to try to push through it almost certainly didn’t help. Drummond was only able to play 16 of the 55 games that followed his injury against the Spurs.
Throughout the season, Nick Nurse often said any time he tried to get back on his feet, the injury would flare up badly again.
It seemed to bother Drummond more than expected. After one of his few positive games on the year, dropping 25 points and 18 rebounds in a loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, he remarked that he “didn’t know how much you needed a big toe to do what I do.” He only appeared in four more games after that.
After a productive half-season at the beginning of 2021-22, the reunion could not have gone worse. The emergence of rookie Adem Bona down the stretch only seemed to shine a brighter light on how diminished Drummond seemed this season.
With that being said, it’s hard to see him finding better value on the open market than the $5 million player option he has to return to the Sixers next season. Perhaps there’s a trade this summer they can roll up that salary into, or just use a draft pick to dump his contract.
Odds are though, Drummond will be back on the roster for the start of next season. For now, the Sixers’ best hope is he can rest up and look somewhat better physically come training camp.
At his exit interview, he was confident that the injury would now be able to heal that he can take some time off. He said trying to muscle through it was something his body rejected, something only rest will make better. A big concern though is his 2024-25 stats before and after the injury are very similar.
Season Grade: D