The Philadelphia 76ers are going to have to wait a little longer to see offseason acquisition Paul George in action. George missed Philadelphia’s season-opening 124-109 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks on Wednesday, and now the team has announced that George will not play during the upcoming two-game road trip — at Toronto on Friday and at Indiana on Sunday — as he continues to nurse a left knee bone bruise.
The Sixers return home to host Detroit next Wednesday, and we’ll see if George is able to play by then. We’ll have a better indication next week, when an update on his availability is expected, per the Sixers.
This comes as Philadelphia is also, according to CBS Sports Insider Bill Reiter, under investigation for the participation, or lack thereof, of former MVP center Joel Embiid, who missed the opener against Milwaukee without a specified injury.
The league is trying to crack down on these star absences in the age of load management, as it should. People pay good money to see these guys play. It’s the reason the players are paid so extraordinarily well.
This investigation is protocol now, as the league will automatically, and specifically, look into absences in nationally televised games. If they don’t find a legitimate reason for the absence, a fine could be handed down. Or nothing could happen. We’ll see.
But it surely doesn’t help that Embiid recently told ESPN that he “may never play in back-to-back [games] the rest of [his] career” as the Sixers put all their eggs in the basket of keeping the franchise big man healthy for playoff time, at whatever cost to their seeding or anything else.
In case you’re wondering, the Sixers play 15 back-to-back games this season. if Embiid were to miss all of those, he would only be able to miss two more games before he would fall below the 65-game minimum to be eligible for awards such as MVP.
Now that he’s won that award, he seemingly does not care about pushing his limits to win it again. He’s going to get his rest. The league is going to be looking into Embiid absences a lot this season, you can count on that.
This Georgie situation is different. He has a noted injury. Still, the Sixers were without two of their three best players on opening night and will continue to be without them until further notice, and Embiid has already been announced as out for the first week of the season with injury management. That’s the sort of vague reasoning the league is going to look at.
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