NBA playoffs 2026: Why familiar summer questions await the 76ers
THE FOURTH QUARTER had but to start, however Joel Embiid‘s season was already over.
Embiid spent the last 16 minutes of Sunday’s Eastern Conference semifinal Game 4 — the Philadelphia 76ers suffered a 30-point series-ending beatdown by the New York Knicks — watching from the bench inside Xfinity Mobile Arena.
Embiid, the 76ers and their followers have grown used to disappointing endings: Kawhi Leonard‘s four-bounce game winner in 2019. A Game 7 home loss to the Atlanta Hawks in 2021. A Game 6 home loss towards the Boston Celtics in 2023. But amid the calamity that has adopted this franchise since Embiid made his NBA debut in October 2016, few stretches can match the wild swings of Philadelphia’s previous two weeks:
On April 26, Embiid returned lower than three weeks after an emergency appendectomy, just for the 76ers to get routed by the Celtics to fall behind 3-1 in the first spherical.
On May 2, Philadelphia ripped off its third consecutive win — capping what was maybe the greatest playoff stretch of Embiid’s profession — to grow to be the fourth lower-seeded staff in NBA historical past to rally from down 3-1 to win a collection.
On Sunday, with Embiid wanting extra like the model of himself that struggled by the first 4 video games towards Boston, Philadelphia was swept by New York, together with two emphatic losses on the 76ers’ house courtroom. (Embiid missed Game 2 due to proper hip and ankle accidents.)
“At times it’s OK to say that the other team was just better,” Embiid stated after the loss. “Tonight, they made every shot, they made every single play, we didn’t make shots.”
It was the second time the 2023 NBA Most Valuable Player discovered himself swept out of the playoffs, the newest intestine punch to a famous person and a franchise which have skilled loads over the previous decade.
It’s additionally the newest reminder of how fragile the 76ers will all the time be with Embiid as their basis. And, as Philadelphia enters the offseason by way of its sixth second-round exit in 9 playoffs throughout the Embiid period, it is unclear how a franchise with few choices to enhance the roster is meant to maneuver ahead this summer.
“Ownership, front office, players, coaches,” Embiid stated, “Everybody has just got to get better.”
THE NEWS WOULD have been unimaginable to imagine — if it had concerned anybody else.
The 76ers had endured a season stuffed with accidents to just about everybody on the roster apart from rookie VJ Edgecombe, together with a late-season stretch when Embiid, Tyrese Maxey and Paul George have been all sidelined. But Philadelphia entered the last week of the common season with an opportunity to safe a top-six spot in the Eastern Conference playoffs. It regarded like a staff rounding into type at the proper time.
That was, in fact, earlier than one other setback for Embiid.
When the information that Embiid needed to endure an emergency appendectomy got here down three days earlier than the finish of the common season, a flood of communication got here in from round the league. All of it had the very same tenor: “You cannot make this up,” one scout stated that night time.
The quantity of postseason maladies Embiid has both performed by or been sidelined by is exceptional. Including his surgical procedure this season, the famous person heart has handled:
A fractured orbital bone in 2018 and in 2022
Knee tendinitis in 2019
A proper knee sprain in 2023
A late-season return from left knee surgical procedure, plus a bout of Bell’s palsy, in 2024.
The one postseason during which Embiid did not have an damage was in the NBA’s Orlando, Florida, bubble in 2020. (That season, co-star Ben Simmons missed the playoffs due to a knee damage.)
“When you’ve been through it so much, you think you kind of have the balance of, ‘OK, this is another thing I got to move on from,'” Embiid stated after his 2026 postseason debut towards Boston in Game 4. “But, you know, it hurts. And then it feels like it’s every single time [I’m in the playoffs]. …
“But you possibly can’t quit. You acquired to maintain pushing and never really feel dangerous for your self and, you recognize, simply take it on and attempt to do the greatest job doable.”
It’s also what made the next three wins — including Games 5 and 7 in Boston — so remarkable. Embiid was a dominant two-way force, playing some of the best and most consistent playoff basketball of his career. That culminated with a 34-point, 12-rebound, 6-assist performance in the first Game 7 win of his career.
“It feels good to win,” Embiid said postgame. “Obviously, we acquired a much bigger purpose in thoughts. But lastly beating these guys feels fairly good.”
The 76ers were healthy. They had just beaten Boston in a playoff series — in historic fashion — for the first time in 44 seasons. For Embiid, who had already lost three playoff series to Boston and had dropped all three Game 7s he’d played, it was arguably his best playoff moment to date.
It also turned out to be the last game the 76ers won this season.
THE 2024-25 SEASON could not have gone worse for the 76ers, who began it talking about competing for a championship but spent the final two months competing for optimal draft lottery odds in an effort to keep their top-six protected pick.
Not only did they secure their pick with a 24-58 record, the franchise leapt to No. 3 in the draft to snag Edgecombe, another potential star to help Embiid and the 76ers reach their potential.
It took exactly one game — the season opener in Boston — to show just how lucky Philadelphia got. Edgecombe and Maxey combined for 74 points to lead the 76ers to a dramatic one-point win.
“He was superb,” Embiid told reporters that night of Edgecombe’s 34-point performance, the third-highest total in a rookie debut in NBA history.
“We know that he has it, so we simply need to preserve it going.”
In Game 2 towards Boston in the first spherical, Edgecombe placed on one other present. He turned the first rookie since Tim Duncan — and the youngest ever, surpassing Magic Johnson — to document at the very least 30 factors and 10 rebounds in a playoff sport. Edgecombe then had 23 factors, 6 rebounds and 4 assists in 44 minutes in Game 7 in Boston, enjoying with a maturity and poise far past somebody who will not flip 21 till July 30.
“I’ve been saying it all year long: He’s far surpassed being a rookie,” George stated whereas sitting alongside Edgecombe at the podium after Game 2.
But there have been rising pains alongside the manner. Edgecombe’s effectivity waxed and waned in these playoffs, very similar to it did all through the common season. Still, his manufacturing — 16.0 factors per sport, 5.2 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.4 steals whereas capturing 35% from 3-point vary — was an exciting constructing block and a big motive the 76ers managed to achieve the playoffs regardless of all of the accidents and lineup modifications.
“That was a hell of an impressive rookie season,” 76ers coach Nick Nurse stated. “I mean, he’s a hell of a player and it’s not about shooting, scoring, jumping, any of that stuff. He really knows how to play. He really has a leadership quality to him.”
And then there’s Maxey, the effervescent star who has totally ascended to the place Embiid predicted years in the past: the face of the franchise. He assumed that mantle this season, making his second All-Star staff, along with all however actually incomes his first All-NBA choice when these are introduced later this month.
Maxey set profession highs in factors (28.3 per sport), assists (6.6) and steals (1.9) this season whereas main the league in minutes, turning into a extra vocal presence and taking a step ahead defensively.
“I had [Maxey] when he was a rookie and so to see the progression every single year that he’s made on the court, off the court … I’m extremely proud of him,” Embiid stated. “And I think VJ, he’s on the same path and he’s going to be a monster.”
After failed makes an attempt with Simmons, Markelle Fultz and James Harden, Philadelphia has lastly landed the true co-star crucial to realize the franchise’s championship ambitions. But as the focus shifts to subsequent season, the query is whether or not Embiid’s physique will enable him to reap the benefits of Maxey’s star flip.
THE UPDATE CAME out of the blue, in the type of an early afternoon damage report.
Embiid, who had been possible to play Wednesday’s Game 2 in New York regardless of proper hip and ankle accidents, had been declared out. He would return to play in Games 3 and 4 in Philadelphia, however with him struggling to maneuver successfully, Jalen Brunson and the Knicks made fast work of the 76ers.
“All I can say is I commend him,” Nurse stated of Embiid after Game 4. “He worked his ass off to get out there and play. I think it was really difficult for him, especially [in Game 3]. I think he felt a little better today than he did in Game 3. But again, I’d just say he gave us everything he could.”
After by no means wanting proper throughout the 19 video games he performed in 2024-25 earlier than being shut down with one other left knee surgical procedure, Embiid slowly started resembling his All-NBA type this season. He confirmed throughout 38 video games (26.9 factors and seven.7 rebounds per sport) and in the collection win towards Boston that he is nonetheless a big difference-maker — when accessible.
But availability stays a big query, and never only for Embiid. Since George was signed to a four-year, $212 million max contract two years in the past (the identical offseason Embiid was given a three-year, $193 million extension by 2028-29), Embiid, George and Maxey have hardly been on the courtroom collectively.
George has performed 78 regular-season video games with the 76ers, together with simply 37 this 12 months, partially due to a 25-game suspension for violating the league’s antidrug coverage.
Across the previous two common seasons, the star trio has performed 36 video games and 742 minutes collectively — simply 22% of Philadelphia’s video games and fewer than 10% of its whole minutes. Considering they mix to earn roughly 94% of the staff’s wage, that stage of availability is just about unimaginable to beat.
EMBIID’S POSTSEASON CAREER has adopted a gentle theme: premature, typically unfortunate accidents serving to to derail a tantalizing playoff run. Embiid has rarely been wholesome for a complete playoffs, unable to completely summon the sport that has made him considered one of the sport’s dominant forces over the previous decade.
As he prepares to enter his thirteenth 12 months in the NBA since being drafted in 2014, it is unlikely his physique goes to out of the blue enable for 65-plus regular-season video games and full complement of playoff video games. The 76ers, in the meantime, do not at present have the belongings or monetary flexibility to mitigate that danger.
Embiid and George are set to make over $200 million mixed over the subsequent two seasons. The selections by president of basketball operations Daryl Morey to increase Embiid and signal George two summers in the past, whereas comprehensible at the time, have left the franchise with out choices to reshape the roster round Maxey and Edgecombe.
And given how compacted the cash is round the league, and the difficulties that include buying and selling any participant on an costly contract, it is tough to see a situation during which the 76ers transfer on from both veteran star.
Change can solely are available in the margins. Philadelphia holds the twenty second choose in June’s draft, which it acquired from the Oklahoma City Thunder in change for Jared McCain at the commerce deadline. The deal acquired the 76ers out of the luxurious tax this season however put Morey in sizzling water for transferring on from a preferred younger participant. (Rival executives typically thought Philadelphia did properly to get again a first-round choose and three second-rounders, however McCain going 9-for-11 from 3-point vary by the first three video games of Oklahoma City’s second-round collection hasn’t helped.)
With six gamers underneath contract for subsequent season, plus the No. 22 choose on this 12 months’s draft, Philadelphia sits roughly $14.5 million beneath the luxurious tax line, per ESPN’s Bobby Marks — and that is earlier than re-signing two of their prime six gamers, Kelly Oubre Jr. and Quentin Grimes, who’re unrestricted free brokers this summer, and presumably inking ahead Dominick Barlow to a brand new longer-term deal, too.
Retaining them would all however actually put Philadelphia into the luxurious tax, a threshold the franchise has escaped 4 years in a row. It would additionally imply operating out principally the identical roster that wasn’t near difficult the Knicks for a spot in the convention finals.
As a outcome, it is secure to imagine the 76ers will enter subsequent season observing the identical query: Will Embiid and the 76ers ever discover a path — and the damage luck — to contend for an NBA title?
Embiid struck a positive tone Sunday when discussing the future, declaring that he thinks his knee troubles are behind him and that he is wanting ahead to a summer of labor forward of one other season of promise in Philadelphia.
“I hate losing, but I thought I was done,” Embiid stated after Game 4. “That’s the best way to put it. And then I found something and we found something as a group to figure out what we have to do to make sure I’m better positioned next year to play a lot of games.”