Joel Embiid’s lost season, La Salle’s ‘Moneyball’ approach to replacing Fran Dunphy, and other thoughts

First and final thoughts …

At exactly 4 p.m. Friday, the 76ers released a statement confirming that Joel Embiid’s 2024-25 season had ended. Embiid, the team, and “top specialists” who had examined and treated his ailing left knee had “determined that he is medically unable to play and will … focus on treatment and rehabilitation.”

This outcome was a fait accompli. This decision should have been made weeks ago, if not months ago. The Sixers lost 12 of their first 14 games. They were cooked by mid-November. A push to secure a playoff or play-in spot was always a pipe dream. What’s more, anyone who had paid attention to the inconsistent quality of Embiid’s play and, more important, to his physical condition during last summer’s Olympics could see something like this coming.

» READ MORE: Is Joel Embiid refusing to play through pain? Not exactly. We think.

The Sixers took the risk that Embiid could play through the pain and damage in that knee, that his body would adjust to the injury. They even took the greater risk of signing him to a contract extension, based on the not-completely-ridiculous thinking that they had no choice but to go all-in with him. It is difficult enough to acquire one player of Embiid’s talent. Letting him walk away, then acquiring another player who is just as good or better, is a challenge few NBA franchises, if any, are eager to take on.

Those gambles didn’t work, and that pattern — gambles that don’t work, risks that don’t pan out, rosters that were reshuffled over and over — has defined Embiid’s tenure with the Sixers. Their decision to draft him in 2014 was fraught with the worry that the injuries he’d already suffered and the surgeries he’d already undergone would prevent him from fulfilling his potential, if he even suited up for the Sixers at all.

The comparisons were easy and fresh in everyone’s memory: Yao Ming, Bill Walton, Sam Bowie, gifted big men betrayed by their bodies. You can add Embiid to that list and keep him there. The Sixers had their shot with him, but that window they had — with him at his best, with him as arguably the best player in the league — is shut.

“Overall the risk isn’t in taking him, to me,” Jeff Van Gundy, who coached Yao with the Houston Rockets, told me not long after the Sixers drafted Embiid. “The risk would have been in not taking him. If you have a chance for a Hall of Fame-caliber player, you take it, and then you hope for the best. You don’t win championships without Hall of Fame-caliber players. Here’s my thing: Would you take seven years of greatness or 12 years of mediocrity? It’s not just longevity. It’s longevity, but it’s also, ‘How great can you be?’”

In Joel Embiid’s case, not quite great enough for not quite long enough.

» READ MORE: La Salle is saying goodbye to Fran Dunphy, the university’s ‘front stoop.’ Where does the basketball program go next?

It is fitting that Ash Puri, La Salle University’s athletic director, once worked as the vice president of strategy and business operations for the Oakland A’s. In finding and hiring Fran Dunphy’s successor as the Explorers’ men’s basketball coach, Puri and the rest of the university’s decision-makers will have to approach the process from a Billy Beane-style perspective. They will have to Moneyball the heck out of this thing.

Duquesne’s 67-62 victory Thursday night at John Glaser Arena was La Salle’s sixth straight loss. All of those six have been to Atlantic 10 teams. Now 12-16, the Explorers seem to have hit a wall after exceeding expectations through the first 11 weeks of their season. And the mostly empty student section at a newly renovated arena was a testament to the challenge facing the university’s leaders: The team has to start winning to improve the perception of the program. But the team won’t win until the perception of the program improves. It’s a shame La Salle can’t hire Joseph Heller.

So what kind of coach is Puri looking for?

“Someone who understands the landscape,” he said Thursday. “I think that is critical — all the nuance around [name, image, and likeness], transfer portal, recruiting, raising money, the whole landscape. I’d like someone who has won basketball games and been a part of a winning program, someone who looks at La Salle and says, ‘I appreciate where they are. Got a nice, refreshed building. Got locker rooms that are going to come online soon.’

“We’re eliminating obstacles, but we’re not where we want to be. The new coach will be accepting of what we have and what it’s going to be.”

The new coach also will have to come equipped with a strategy that can set La Salle apart, that can give it a shot at competing. That’s the Moneyball aspect here: In the narratives of the movie and book, the A’s evaluated players differently — prioritizing statistics and qualities that other franchises overlooked — and their approach gave them an edge. It maximized the limited investment they could make in player salaries, their dumpy ballpark, and other resources.

» READ MORE: The great Gene Hackman is gone, and so is Hollywood’s greatest coach: Norman Dale of ‘Hoosiers’

The reality for La Salle and programs similar to it is that they have to do the same thing. They have to exploit any stagnancy that might exist within a vast system. They have to try to be unique or at least different. Maybe taking that path requires hiring a young, creative coach who implements a novel style of play, a 21st-century version of John Chaney’s matchup zone defense or Paul Westhead’s run-and-gun offense. Maybe it lies in a radical theory about where and how to recruit players. Whatever form the approach takes, there’s little doubt that it’s a necessary measure for La Salle if the program is to have any chance of surviving and thriving in the new world of college basketball.

If you have a chance, pick up a copy of A Soaring Season, Aaron Bracy’s book about Phil Martelli, Jameer Nelson, and the 2003-04 St. Joseph’s Hawks, who came within a few seconds of the Final Four. It’s a detailed, wistful look back at an unforgettable team.