Chandler Parsons blasts 76ers for not shutting Joel Embiid down sooner: ‘He wasn’t himself’

On Friday, the Philadelphia 76ers opted to shut down star center Joel Embiid for the remainder of the season due to a lingering knee injury that has plagued him since the start of the season, which prompted former NBA player turned NBA media personality Chandler Parsons to ask why this decision didn’t come sooner.

The 76ers decision comes after reports emerged on Thursday from ESPN’s Shams Charania that Embiid has regularly received injections in his injured left knee in order to play this season. Even that hasn’t exactly worked for him, as he has taken part in just 19 of the 76ers’ 58 games played thus far.

Embiid was the center of some severe criticism at the start of the season, as he was held out of the team’s first six games of the season due to an injury that was undiagnosed at the time, which even prompted an investigation from the NBA.

We now know that it seems like Embiid was never playing healthy for the 76ers at any point this season, which has prompted Parsons to question why it took the team so long to come to this decision.

“They knew about this injury,” said Parsons on FanDuel TV’s Run it Back. “Go watch Joel Embiid play in the Olympics this summer. Whether that was fair, unfair, selfish, or whatever the reasons you want to call him. He wasn’t himself. This is nothing new. So my frustration, my concern is, this isn’t something that was just going to naturally heal. This is required surgery since October. It’s probably frustrating, too, for the fan base because you’ll see some games where he does get going and he cooks and he’s dominant. He looks like that MVP from two years ago. Just knowing what I know and what they know, it’s not getting better, and it can get worse.

“Again, like Michelle said, every day that goes by, you’re now smoking next season in the beginning of training camp and everything. You could have eliminated that. He could have already been two months post-op if he just did it in the beginning of the season. But I get it. This team is built now and healthy. They’re saying, What if we do get in the play in right now and Joel is magically healthy? It’s just not going to ever happen until he has surgery.”

Technically, the 76ers are still in contention to compete for the final play-in spot in the top-heavy Eastern Conference, sitting just 2.5 games behind the Chicago Bulls for the No. 10 seed. So maybe the 76ers organization was clinging to the hope that Embiid’s health would progress as the season went on.

Either way, the 76ers haven’t looked like real contender at any point of the season. To further jeopardize the long-term health of a former MVP like Embiid for a floundering team certainly seems like the wrong move.

Now, to Parsons’ point, any potential surgery that Embiid needs to undergo will likely involve a recovery process that may end up stretching into the 2025-26 NBA season. So it’s hard to argue with Parsons’ frustration about how this situation has been handled by the 76ers.