Embiid and Sam Hinkie
"With Joel I think we’re closing in on a decision there. There’s been a lot of work that’s gone into that in the last few weeks since we put out an announcement. And we’ve been talking to a lot of experts around the nation, and honestly around the globe about what the best course of action is for him. We’re not sure what that is. It seems like we’ll get close. As soon as we know, we’ll let you know. But we’re not sure what that is just yet. I will say this as an example though. He was with Marty O’Malley on Tuesday in New York at the hospital for special surgery. I think we’re going to send him to Bob Anderson in Charlotte, North Carolina to Carolina’s medical center to talk with him and to ask those same sets of questions… the kind that we’ve talked about honestly a year ago today.
That we’ve talked about as, “what do we do to give him the best chance to have the best longest NBA career he can possibly have, what does that look like, what are those range of options, what is the upside or the downside of each of those and what is the likelihood of each of those?” And lets talk through all of that. Those are not small decisions. They are the kind that involve Joel, that involve his representatives, that involve all of our best performance staff and that involve all of the best medical experts around the world that we can find.
On whether Joel Embiid's injury status affected the team's decision at #3
"I would like to think we would have the courage to do it anyway, I really do. It’s kind of hard to know because I knew and it’s hard to un-know where things stood with Joel, but I’d like to think we would have had the courage anyway. For example, some of the things we have paid attention to and tried to collect information on give us some confidence that, like, there are some things that can work even in these pairings, that there are things that can really work, like watching Nerlens start the year largely playing the four and then play the middle two thirds of the year or so at the five and then go back and play some five at the end. You get a sense of his defensive versatility and the kinds of things he can do and the kinds of things he needs to get better at.
All of our players need to improve at one thing or another, but having remarkably quick feet and quick hands and being able to bother people with his length and get out on the perimeter and bother shots as well as be weak side shot blocker, you just don’t have to be one the post man all the time and you’re Nerlens, and to be a weak side shot blocker and to be able to fly around, he was remarkably effective in both. He has real defensive versatility that I think would fit very well with Jahlil. In a similar way, Joel, which is not, sort of, the primary motivation, but as well, the versatility that we saw in our practice gym and that his teammates saw that the skillset that Joel had gave us some confidence that you could put another player in the post with him. That’s not out of the realm of possibility at all. Like, he shot it on the perimeter remarkably well. He slid his feet remarkably well, and we think he will continue to. We’ve got to get through this and figure out what is best for him, but Joel has gifts that are unusual and they are array for such a big man."
