Joel Embiid’s Sixers career will likely end in disappointment. Was it fair to expect anything different?

The core criticism of Joel Embiid throughout most of his career with the 76ers can be boiled down to the most basic demands of an elite athlete: Get in shape, and stay in shape. Be healthy, and do your very best to remain healthy.

All the suggestions that Embiid’s 11 years in Philadelphia have been pretty much a waste flow from that source. To be sure, Embiid has provided his share of reasons to be skeptical that he was ever going to lead the Sixers to a championship, let alone the run of dominance that would have justified, in everyone’s mind, The Process’s steep sacrifice of tanking for three-plus years.

From chugging sugary Shirley Temples as a rookie to getting called out for tardiness this season by Tyrese Maxey, from his failures to finish off playoff series the Sixers should have won to his growing sense of entitlement and indignation, he has given his critics plenty of ammunition. But his repeated and lengthy absences from the lineup have inspired most of the eye-rolling and frustration that now characterize any conversation about him, especially in this lost season, when the problems with his left knee have raised the question of whether he’ll ever again be close to the player he once was.

If only he hadn’t played in the Olympics. … If only he had worked harder. … If only he had done more …

Fair enough. Suppose he had worked harder. Suppose he had practiced and played more. After sitting out those two years immediately after the Sixers drafted him in 2014, Embiid will have played in 452 of a possible 738 regular-season games over his subsequent nine years with the team. He has never played more than 68 games in one season. Suppose he had. Suppose no one uttered the phrase load management during Embiid’s time with the Sixers, and suppose, from the start of the 2016-17 season on, he and they had committed themselves to having him suit up every night. Forget the long term. Forget the metaphor of a marathon. Embiid and the Sixers were going to sprint full-bore to greatness, and if they pulled up lame, so be it.

Would his career have turned out better? Would it?

Would the Sixers have been more successful? Would they?

It has become a cliche to note how many big men in the NBA have had their careers truncated by injury. Still, it’s worth reviewing that history and some of the science behind it just to put Embiid’s tenure in some perspective.

In August 2022, for instance, the journal Arthroscopy, Sports Medicine, and Rehabilitation published the results of a study that “support[ed] the correlation with physiologic burden and knee injury risk in NBA players. Multivariable analysis not only showed a positive correlation with minutes per game and usage rate but also that these same factors were also significantly associated with increased games missed. Notably, this was significant while controlling for confounding factors of age, body mass index, and number of games played. … Increased minutes per game and usage rate were significantly associated with a longer duration of game loss.”

» READ MORE: Joel Embiid receives well wishes from Sixers teammates after shutting down for rest of season

Put simply, the more games and minutes a player played, the more likely he was to injure himself and the longer he’d be sidelined. The study examined knee injuries, but knees aren’t the only parts of the body to which an athlete who stands around 7 feet tall, weighs around 300 pounds, and runs, cuts, twists, and jumps for a living applies an inordinate amount of stress and strain.

Brad Daugherty played at least 71 games in six of his eight seasons with the Cleveland Cavaliers. That relatively brief stretch, eight seasons, was all he lasted in the league because of back issues. Greg Oden’s knees limited him to 105 games in his NBA career. Stress fractures in Sam Bowie’s legs transformed him from a potential star center into the answer to a bitter trivia question: Who was the bust of a prospect the Portland Trail Blazers picked ahead of Michael Jordan in the 1984 draft?

At least the Blazers won a championship in 1977 with Bill Walton before his feet completely ruined his career, and one could argue that Walton’s achievement in leading Portland to that victory over Julius Erving and the Sixers makes him “better” than Embiid in some sense. But it doesn’t change the fact that Walton missed four full years because of his injuries and appeared in 67 games or fewer in nine of the 10 seasons in which he did play.

There might be no more appropriate comparison to Embiid, though, than Yao Ming, who embodied the challenge that any franchise faces when it has a great center or post player who happens to be injury-prone: How do we maximize his talent before his body breaks down?

“This guy was a dominant, dominant player,” Jeff Van Gundy, who coached Yao for four years with the Houston Rockets, once told me. “People forget about how great he was. He dominated Dwight Howard, just obliterated him on a nightly basis.”

Seven-foot-6, four inches taller than Embiid, Yao did his best to keep his weight as low as possible — 300 to 305 pounds, with 4-5% body fat. “He was incredibly fit, but still, the pounding was incredibly hard on his body,” Van Gundy said. “You certainly have to pace a guy like that in practice and in games.” At his best, Yao was among the most valuable players in the league — over one three-year period, he averaged 23 points, more than 10 rebounds, and nearly two blocked shots — but his lower extremities couldn’t hold up. A toe, a foot, a knee: He was all but finished after seven seasons.

“We tried to limit as much as possible,” Van Gundy said. “You can maybe keep him a little rested, but you have to keep him in rhythm so he can play well. That’s the fine line you’re always trying to walk: how to accomplish both. First of all, Yao was such an incredible worker. He did so much work on his own that, looking back, if I could have had one thing, I might have slowed that a little bit. But then he wouldn’t have been the player he was, either. You can never practice him, but then how well can he play?”

The same conundrums have defined the Joel Embiid era: two scoring titles, an MVP award, so many unfulfilled hopes. Nine years with the Sixers, and maybe the best of Embiid is gone forever now, and it wasn’t enough to win a single championship. It wasn’t enough to qualify for even one appearance in the Eastern Conference finals. It wasn’t enough for anyone to be satisfied. But what if it was as good as it was ever going to get?