Another lost postseason for Joel Embiid, but it doesn’t change much for the Sixers

At this point, all you can do is shrug and go back to your yard work. The Sixers deserve some credit for scrapping together a season that might actually have amounted to something. But they had a long way to go before anybody could feel comfortable believing in them. The news that Joel Embiid will likely miss the remainder of the season after undergoing surgery for appendicitis is worthy of reaction mostly on a personal level. It’s a damn shame. That’s all there is to say.

It’s a shame Embiid won’t get a chance to finish out the comeback story he’d begun to author. It’s a shame that he and the Sixers will enter another offseason wondering where they go from here. Mostly, it’s a shame that a player who has long borne the physiological burden of being a supersized athlete with regular human knees is also a player who is saddled by such rotten luck.

» READ MORE: Joel Embiid diagnosed with appendicitis and will undergo surgery in Houston

The list of afflictions that have limited or sidelined Embiid throughout his playoff career already included a fractured orbital bone, a concussion, a torn thumb ligament, and even Bell’s palsy. This, in addition to the knee injuries. Somehow, appendicitis is a new one.

The ramifications are different this time around than they were in 2024 against the New York Knicks (return from left knee surgery), or 2023 against the Brooklyn Nets and Boston Celtics (missed two games with right LCL sprain), or 2022 against the Miami Heat (thumb, two games missed), or 2021 against the Washington Wizards and Atlanta Hawks (knee bruise, one game). The best you could say about the 2025-26 Sixers is that you couldn’t count them out.

When each of them has been at their individual best over the past six months, Tyrese Maxey, VJ Edgecome, Paul George, and Embiid have looked like players who could combine to win four of seven against any team in the NBA. But, then, we rarely, if ever, had a chance to see them do it all together. Which made it easy to dismiss the likelihood that they would magically do it once the playoffs started.

In order to win a title, the Sixers would have needed to win 17 or 18 out of 29 or 30 games over a span of two months. Embiid had played in 38 games total during the regular season. George has played 34.

It is a credit to them that they made things interesting. George had spent most of his first year-and-a-half with the Sixers alternatively looking washed and checked out. Since returning from a 25-game drug policy suspension, he has played like the difference-maker the club envisioned when they signed him to a four-year max contract in the summer of 2024. George entered Thursday averaging 24.4 points, 6.1 rebounds, and four assists while hitting four three-pointers per night at a 47% clip in seven games since returning.

Even more impressive was Embiid’s turnaround after missing 14 of the Sixers’ first 22 games. Between Dec. 7 and Feb. 7, he played in 23 of 30 games and looked a lot like his old self. He averaged 29.4 points on 19.5 shots in almost 34 minutes per game. The Sixers went 14-9 in those 23 games. In the last 11, Embiid scored 30-plus points eight times. Some argued he belonged in the All-Star Game. Others went further and invoked the “B” word: Embiid was back.

» READ MORE: Joel Embiid battling mild case of Bell’s palsy on left side of his face: ‘I’m not going to quit’

And then he wasn’t. First came a five-game absence due to “right knee injury management”. Then, after a two-game cameo, Embiid suffered an oblique injury that sidelined him for the next 13 games. He returned long enough for the Sixers to rattle off a couple of big-time wins over the Charlotte Hornets and the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Now, here we are.

If Embiid’s season is over, he will have played 19 more games than he did last season, when he played 20 fewer than the season before. He has three straight seasons of fewer than 40 regular-season games. Even if you count his six playoff contests in 2024, he is averaging just 34 per year. He will be 32 years old next season, still under contract for another three years and $188 million.

The calculus hasn’t changed. Embiid is mostly irrelevant to the course the Sixers must chart forward. He will be here, and he will play when he can. But the Sixers can’t afford to make him a consideration when evaluating ways to build around a Maxey/Edgecombe nucleus. George’s future is a little more uncertain. There is at least a chance a contending team would trade for him without requiring a cost-prohibitive amount of draft capital from the Sixers in return. But those are discussions for another day.

For now, the Sixers are where most of us expected they’d be at the start of the season. Counting down the days.