WIP AM: Spike Eskin on Embiid Future

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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.