Lock The Sixers Medical Staff In A Lead Submarine And Sink It To The Bottom Of The Atlantic Ocean
by Boobie
On Wednesday night, Joel Embiid fell to the ground following a botched dribble handoff and collision with Markelle Fultz. This isn’t unusual — for a player whose career has been largely defined by injury, Embiid has no problem mixing it up, diving into the stands after loose balls, and giving Sixers fans heart attacks so frequently that we’ve become a bit desensitized to cardiac arrest. This time was different, though, because instead of being helped up by a teammate, limping awkwardly for a moment, then moments later recovering from headging a pick and roll by blocking a shot in a way that doesn’t look particularly athletic but obviously is freakishly so based on the amount of ground covered and the perfect timing of it all, he stayed down. You could basically watch the blood drain out of the face of every fan at the Wells Fargo Center simultaneously.
Luckily, it wasn’t a knee-to-knee collision that could cause structural damage or anything like that, and after the game, we even got good news:
Honestly, it’s on us for believing that. We’ve been through enough that we should be cynical by now — Andrew Bynum being three weeks away from paying for an entire season, Embiid missing two seasons, Ben Simmons doing exactly what Bynum did, Embiid playing on a surgery-requiring torn meniscus because the team thought his knee was simpy bruised, every other member of the team then missing the rest of the season with torn menisci as though that’s fucking contagious or something, and Fultz missing 68 games with something that was probably somehow vaguely shoulder-related. Maybe the combination of the Eagles winning the Super Bowl (Eagles won Super Bowl — Brady dropped it twice) and the Sixers looking like a legit Eastern Conference Finals contender made us soft, made us forget that our heads need to always be on a swivel for the next disaster. Because, almost impressively, every relevant medical detail in that summary was wrong.
Embiid has a concussion. He has a broken orbital bone that will require surgery and put the first round of the playoffs in jeapoardy. How is it possible for an NBA team, which skyrocketing valuation prices afford the best medical staffs money can buy, and get ALL of that wrong? If Joel had walked in with his head clinging to his neck by one tiny bit of skin like Nearly Headless Nick, would they disgnose him with the flu? Did they watch the season-opening Cavaliers-Celtics game where Gordon Hayward gruesomely fractured his ankle and look at each other and all agree that it looked like he’d miss a couple games with scurvy? Do they have an x-ray machine or do they have a box labeled “X-RAY MACHINE 1000” with guy sitting in it drawing sketches of what he thinks happened to save money?
The Process was kicked off by a draft-day trade in which the Sixers got the rights to Nerlens Noel and a first round pick from the New Orleans Pelicans in exchange for Jrue Holiday and a second rounder. The Sixers were later ordered to pay the Pels $3 million for not disclosing an injury Holiday had suffered. Can the team get that back? Because given what we know now, it would be legitimately shocking for the Sixers medical staff to actually know about an injury one of their players had.
Luckily, this misdiagnosis doesn’t effect the recovery time because the injury was obvious when it happened and the mistake, as glaring as it was, was caught quickly by competent doctors, but it’s still an egregious error, and we’re all about process over results anyway. So, what’s to be done moving forward? I don’t want to advocate for anyone to losing their job, because that’s mean, but if we trust the Sixers to choose someone to perform Embiid’s surgery, he’ll come out of it looking like Sammy Sosa and will probably somehow have his feet taken off and put on the wrong legs. Therefore, I propose that they are given a challenge in order to keep their jobs.
Here’s the scenario: the team brings in famously injury-riddled former Trailblazers center Greg Oden. The medical staff then needs to run a battery of diagnostic tests, figure out what’s wrong with him (I don’t know of any medical issues Oden might have currently, but unfortunately, he definitely has at least one or two major ones), and then have a team-sanctioned surgeon operate on him to fix him. If they do everything correctly and Oden recovers as he would under a competent team, they get to “keep their jobs” and then immediately hand in their resignations. If, as is more likely, they get absolutely everything fucking wrong like they always do and the test somehow ends in a 30 megaton nuclear explosion, then, obviously, they don’t get to keep their jobs, because they along with millions of other people are dead. Either outcome works for Sixers fans, because it means they can’t do any more damage to Joel Embiid.
Or, rather than risk the lives of poor Greg Oden and millions of people within a hundred mile radius of Greg Oden, the team can simply lock the training staff in a lead submarine and then sink the submarine to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, as this blog’s headline suggests. Technically it’s not murder until someone checks the submarine to see if anyone is dead, because of Schroedinger’s cat. I don’t really have a preference here, I just want them all as far from my beautiful sons as possible.
