At media day this past fall, team president Daryl Morey said the Sixers were “going to be really smart” about how they managed Joel Embiid throughout the regular season, as they were more concerned with “April, May, June” (aka, the playoffs). He later told ESPN’s Tim Bontemps that the Sixers would try to avoid having Embiid and Paul George playing in “many back-to-backs, if any.”
That about-face was widely praised at the time—including by yours truly here!—but there was one problem with the Sixers’ big-picture focus on the playoffs: They still needed to win enough games to make it there in the first place.