Joel Embiid will miss Thursday's meeting with the Boston Celtics on Thursday, a team official told reporters at the Sixers' practice facility on Wednesday, due to what they are calling a, "left ring finger injury."
While the Sixers were conducting practice Wednesday, Embiid was away from the team seeing a specialist. The team hopes to have more information on the extent of the injury later on Wednesday.
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Though all parties avoided getting into specifics and timelines regarding Embiid's left hand, Brett Brown told reporters at practice that the possibility of Embiid missing time has absolutely weighed on his mind during practice over the last two days.
"I'm trying to beat the Boston Celtics and prepare the team to go beat the Boston Celtics, but to think that I'm not thinking longer, whenever the news comes out, would be disingenuous," Brown said. "You have to think, now what does this mean?...if you tilted the priorities of where did you weight this practice, it certainly was driven toward trying to beat Boston. But I would be lying if [we] didn't do some things in the event you receive news."
Embiid dislocated the finger in gruesome fashion against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Monday night, moments after returning from a trip to the locker room to get his already ailing hand X-rayed. Following that win Monday, Embiid told reporters he initially believed he had fractured his hand, but felt the need to power through to help out his team during a tough stretch.
"I think it happened a couple of plays earlier, I felt my finger snapping and I thought I fractured it. I went in the locker room, they did some X-rays and they said it was nothing," Embiid said, "I came back...and then it just happened. It was just unfortunate," Embiid told reporters. "It was pretty bad, I was basically playing with one hand."
The Sixers did receive a bit of good news to offset any anxiety over Embiid's health. Matisse Thybulle was a full participant in Wednesday's practice one day after competing in a scrimmage with Sixers staffers and backups, and the team says he will be available for their meeting with Boston on Thursday night.
While he was on the shelf, the team tried to ensure Thybulle was continuing to learn and grow even without access to playing time. Thybulle tried to maintain his pregame routine (physically working out aside) in spite of being unable to play, and he received guidance from players and coaches alike during his downtime. Brown had constant conversations with him about what he was seeing and what was done right & wrong by his teammates on the floor, and Tobias Harris spent time going through plays with the rookie on tablets in an effort to build up his knowledge of the scheme.
Thybulle is antsy to get back to work — he took the rare step of sprinting over to media availability, a contrast to the slow death march of most players — and he believes the things he learned from the sideline will benefit him on the floor moving forward.
"The opportunity to watch these guys play, watch more basketball, and get a feel from like an outside perspective of what's going on out there, I think that's helped me a lot knowing where I can help more, and there's areas other guys are doing good that I can adopt into my own game," Thybulle said Wednesday. "Watching people make the mistakes I usually make out there and seeing how you can avoid those, that's something I actually picked up on a lot."
We will keep you posted on any further updates regarding Joel Embiid's health. They will have to beat the Boston Celtics without him regardless.
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