The relationship between Embiid and the Sixers has been frayed at times over the years, which perhaps explains why they rushed to extend him last offseason.
After shelling out max contracts to Paul George and Tyrese Maxey during the 2024 offseason, the Sixers weren’t done quite yet. Shortly before training camp began, they signed Joel Embiid to a three-year max contract extension that will begin in 2026-27.
At that time, Embiid still had two guaranteed years left on his current contract, along with a $59.0 million player option for the 2026-27 campaign. Had they not extended him before the start of the regular season, he wouldn’t have been eligible to sign an extension until this offseason, but he still would have had one fully guaranteed season remaining.
Just about the worst-case scenario unfolded from there, as Embiid seemed to never fully recover from the meniscus surgery he underwent in February 2024. He began the year sidelined with “left knee injury management,” and he proceeded to play only 19 games before the Sixers shut him down again for the season.
In retrospect, the decision to extend Embiid looks like a potentially franchise-crippling mistake. If he can’t stay healthy, the Sixers won’t be able to overcome his massive contract weighing them down. Handing him that deal before seeing him in action at training camp and the preseason—where the scope of his knee issues started to become clear—was the own-goal of all own-goals, although the Sixers continue to stand by it.
The recent ESPN feature on Embiid from Dotun Akintoye might shed some behind-the-scenes light on why they feel that way, results thus far be damned.
Throughout the story, it becomes increasingly clear how much Embiid struggles with trusting most people around him. That includes people within the Sixers organization over the past decade.
When Embiid was wrestling with his initial foot injury after being drafted along with the death of his brother, Akintoye wrote that “his relationship with the 76ers unraveled.”
Embiid believed something was wrong with his injury, but the team brushed it off as laziness, several sources told me. Frustrated, he quit showing up to rehab and training and stopped communicating with the team.
“I had to start being an a—hole,” Embiid says. “Whatever they asked me to do, I was, like, ‘I’m not doing it.’”
The 76ers, unsure what to do, responded by repeatedly fining him. Embiid tells me he stopped keeping track of how much he was fined that year after the amount reached $300,000. “It’s worth it,” Embiid remembers thinking. “They’re not listening to me, and I’m not going to keep putting my body at risk.”
In June 2015, Embiid met with the doctor who initially operated on his foot and found out that it wasn’t healing properly. According to Akintoye, Embiid remembered “feeling disappointed but also vindicated.”
He was right, and his critics within the organization were wrong. Something had been wrong with his foot. He wasn’t imagining pain or making excuses. This was a difficult lesson to unlearn; it is easy to become a prisoner of one’s own victories.
A nebulous and contradictory they began to form in Embiid’s mind: the coaches, front office executives and medical staff who had “cast him out,” as one friend puts it. They wanted to save their jobs, he thought. They wanted him to play hurt — to prove themselves right for drafting him, to prove themselves right for not wanting to draft him, to sell tickets, to show that he didn’t sell tickets. They would be just as happy if his career lasted 18 months or 18 years.
Loyalty became overwhelmingly important to him, and his search for it, his willingness to test it in others, became a way he forged a path within the organization. He remained in a protective bubble, amassing and shedding adherents.
The front office and medical staff who oversaw Embiid’s original injury are long gone, although the ownership group largely remains the same. And he found himself right back in a similar situation this past season with his knee injury.
The uncertainty about his knee reignited old tensions between Embiid and the Sixers’ front office.
After months of uncertainty, false starts and recurrent swelling, Embiid couldn’t take it anymore. In February, before a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, Embiid told ESPN’s Lisa Salters that he would need another surgery, which reportedly surprised the organization. Morey acknowledged that surprise in our meeting.
“If you don’t want to listen to me, then I have to find something else, to make sure that I’m going to be listened to,” Embiid tells me. “When I told Lisa that, I think it was a cry for help. … It feels like everybody refuses to acknowledge what’s actually going on.”
How does this all relate to the Sixers’ decision to sign Embiid to an extension prior to last season, you might wonder? Well, think about the underlying message here. Loyalty is extremely important to him. By offering him that type of money with two guaranteed years left on his contract—particularly before they could see his knee in action at training camp—the Sixers were proving their loyalty to him. Had they held off, it could have sowed seeds of doubt in Embiid’s mind about his future in Philadelphia.
The whole point in signing George to a max contract last offseason was that he could be an ideal third banana alongside Embiid and Tyrese Maxey. The Sixers were (hopefully) under no illusion that he could carry the team if Embiid missed extended time. Team president Daryl Morey has repeatedly spoken about how we never got to see the version of George that they anticipated specifically because he spent such little time alongside Embiid.
So, imagine what might have happened if the Sixers didn’t offer Embiid an extension ahead of last season. Would that have set the stage for an eventual trade request, had he stayed healthy? Would he have tried to force his way to Miami to play with Jimmy Butler again? Would the Golden State Warriors have gambled on him rather than Butler? The possibilities are nearly endless.
“[George is] only here because he wants to play with the organization, but very specifically with Joel Embiid, and I think for us, that was the best plan to put the best team together, and that’s a group decision,” Morey told reporters during his end-of-season press conference when asked why the Sixers didn’t wait to extend Embiid. “When you make those decisions. A long way of saying, when you have Paul signed long term, it’s important for your MVP-level player to also be signed long term.”
It’s fair to wonder whether the Sixers accurately weighed the downside risk of Embiid’s extension. After all, he was extension-eligible up until the final day before the regular season began. Why not wait until after training camp at the very least to make sure his knee responded as expected? (In their defense, the Sixers did seek “half a dozen medical opinions” before they extended him, according to ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne.)
Given Embiid’s longstanding trust issues, they might have felt that was the best way to prevent questions about his future from bubbling to the surface. After all, the Sacramento Kings wound up trading star point guard De’Aaron Fox—whose current contract also expires after the 2025-26 season—once Klutch Sports superagent Rich Paul “informed the Kings that it would be wise to move him sooner rather than later,” per Sam Amick of The Athletic.
Had the Sixers not extended Embiid and he stayed healthy at the start of last season, would he have considered a similar tactic? Particularly once injuries began mounting around him? We’ll never know, but that might have been a factor that the Sixers had to weigh.
If nothing else, Akintoye’s feature should be yet another reminder that behind-the-scenes factors often impact team-building decisions. We’re only working with a limited set of knowledge when we analyze what moves the Sixers did or didn’t make. Some are easier to read into than others, such as their decision not to offer Guerschon Yabusele the taxpayer mid-level exception this offseason. (You can thank Quentin Grimes and the second apron for that.) Other times, we have no clue what may be fueling those moves or non-moves.
The Sixers can only hope that last year was an outlier and that Embiid will stay relatively healthy moving forward. Otherwise, regardless of what motivated them to extend him with two fully guaranteed years left on his contract, it could prove to be an insurmountable blunder.
Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Salary Swish and salary-cap information via RealGM.
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