If you listened to sports talk radio over the last two months and the Sixers were being discussed, there is a pretty decent chance that the team’s medical staff came up. Whenever comparisons to Dr. Nick Riviera are made (Leo Spaceman is my personal favorite), something has gone seriously wrong.
And on the injury front, not much went right for the Sixers in 2016-17. Each case was different as some were quick incidents and others felt more like sagas, but Jerryd Bayless, Ben Simmons, Joel Embiid, Jahlil Okafor, and Robert Covington all dealt with season-ending injuries at one point of the year or another. Nobody would argue that the Sixers are a particularly healthy team at the moment.
But how about this team’s favorite word, process? Sixers president of basketball operations Bryan Colangelo, speaking on Friday at the practice facility in Camden, expressed that he still has confidence in the team’s support staff.
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“I have no doubt that our medical team on site and the people that work with the athletes on a daily basis, that care [for them] is really world-class,” Colangelo said.
It probably should also be noted that Colangelo oversaw what is widely considered the NBA’s best medical staff in Phoenix during his time running the Suns. At the very least, he should know what the right approach looks like more than most.
Embiid is the team’s most important player and also has the team’s most important injuries, but he is currently in Los Angeles rehabbing. As for the other 14 players that Colangelo and Brett Brown conducted exit interviews with on Thursday (including Simmons), he said that he received positive feedback about the care they were receiving from the Sixers.
“To a man, I would tell you that every player felt like we got great resources and care with respect to their situations,” he said. “Unfortunately, we did have a string of injuries this year, some high-profile and complex scenarios that held us back from perhaps having even more success.”
So, Colangelo is essentially telling people to trust the infrastructure that the Sixers have built throughout all of the Processing, which includes their sports science department.
Other frequent topics of discussion throughout the year were the minutes limit and back-to-back restriction for Embiid. Colangelo hinted that the back-to-back restriction may be eased next season for the 7’2” big man, but he defended the Sixers’ conservative approach with him this year considering the circumstances.
Which, by the way, he was completely right to do. Embiid hadn’t played in over two years, saw pretty significant changes to his body in that time, and despite his absurd talent level, hasn’t really played a ton of basketball in his life.
“He got very comfortable in a 24- to 28-minute role, but the medical experts told us, ‘That’s enough for now’” Colangelo said. “And as it related to now, we are a young, emerging team with a hugely bright future. Why throw that all away because there’s pressure on extending minutes to see and push the envelope?”
“To a man, I would tell you that every player felt like we got great resources and care with respect to their situations. Unfortunately, we did have a string of injuries this year, some high-profile and complex scenarios that held us back from perhaps having even more success.”
Colangelo also discussed the recent news that Embiid didn’t realize his surgery was only a minor procedure until after it happened.
“As we went through seven, eight or nine medical opinions at the time, highly esteemed doctors around the world, there was uncertainty whether it was a partial tear or full tear,” Colangelo said. “And everyone to a man said, ‘There’s no way you’ll know until you get in there.’”
“What happened was, to the delight of really everyone, it was less significant than what was potentially thought as a worst-case scenario,” he later added. “A repair was not necessary, it was a simple Meniscectomy and we move forward and everything’s now been cut in half in terms of recovery time.”
So, it sounds like Colangelo is confident in his entire medical staff moving forward. To keep these Sixers healthy, they're sure going to need to be world-class.
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