Joel Embiid Turned an Ankle While Already Playing Through Plantar Fasciitis. He Finished the Game.
Joel Embiid turned an ankle in the final seconds of the second quarter Tuesday night, limped to the locker room at halftime, then came back out and started the third. That is supposed to be the good news.
Embiid went up for a transition layup, missed it while trying to draw a foul on Jayson Tatum, and landed awkwardly. Paul George, who now plays for Boston and scored 36 in his return to Philadelphia, made incidental contact with the same area going for the rebound. Embiid was slow to get up, stayed in until the buzzer, and walked off gingerly.
“Yeah, it was an ankle turn,” he said afterward, per Ky Carlin of Sixers Wire. Asked how he felt, he said “I’m good,” reportedly with a smirk.
That is the entire official update. Neither the 76ers nor Nick Nurse has announced a diagnosis, any imaging, or a timeline, and his status for Thursday against Toronto has not been set. Nobody has even said which ankle it was.
He Was Already Hurt Before This
Here is the context that turns a shrugged-off ankle tweak into something worth watching. Embiid has been playing through plantar fasciitis in his right foot and has been held to a roughly 25-minute restriction because of it, as Chris Hine of the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on Nov. 3.
“It’s been going on like that for the last few. So yeah, it’s painful,” Embiid told Hine. “Just got to manage it and when it flares up pretty bad, got to take a step back.” Nurse said the team is “managing that and trying to be smart with it.”
Embiid played 31 minutes against Boston. No one has reported that the restriction was lifted, so either it is being applied situationally or it quietly stopped mattering. Six minutes past a stated cap is not a crisis by itself. It does mean Philadelphia is leaning on a 32-year-old center now carrying two separate lower-body problems at the same time.
The Shooting Is Its Own Alarm
Through his first nine games, Embiid was averaging 17.9 points, 9.7 rebounds and 4.1 assists in 31.9 minutes on 38.0 percent shooting and 10.0 percent from three, per Basketball Reference. Noah Levick of NBC Sports Philadelphia put his season 3-point mark at 12.1 percent around this game.
Against the Celtics he went 2-of-9 from the floor and 11-of-13 from the line for 16 points and six rebounds. His third-quarter triple was his first made 3-pointer since Oct. 22. Those are not the numbers of a player whose feet are under him.
Nurse, for what it is worth, framed the team’s problem as shooting rather than health: “I think that we’ve got some guys that are obviously shooting much lower percentages than their last season.”
Nine and Three Anyway
The Sixers lost 123-101 and are still 9-3, second in the Eastern Conference behind a 9-2 Boston team. That record is why nobody is talking about shutting Embiid down, and no reporting suggests anyone is considering it.
The three-year history is harder to wave off. Embiid has played 39, 19 and 38 games in the last three seasons and has not reached 40 since 2022-23. He is signed through 2028-29 on a three-year extension worth roughly $193 million that he agreed to in September 2024, giving up a $59 million player option to do it.
Philadelphia does not need him in November. It needs him in May, and two and a half seasons of evidence say those are different problems. The ankle will probably be fine by Thursday. The foot is the thing that decides how this season ends.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
