PHILADELPHIA — Brett Brown sticks a depth chart on a sizable TV before every game that’s patterned more like a traffic light than a simple in/out list scrawled on most NBA team chalkboards.
Red. Can’t go.
Yellow. Can play, with minute restrictions.
Green. Healthy, let ‘em rip.
Joel Embiid has been stuck at the red light for two years in Tankadelphia at the corner of The Process and Progress just waiting ... waiting ... waiting for the light to flip to yellow and for his career to shift into drive.
Embiid remains the light at the end of Daisy’s dock for a Philadelphia 76ers franchise that has bottomed out like few others in North American professional sports history.