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Last week, the 76ers revealed Joel Embiid needs a second surgery on his right foot and he’ll miss the entire 2015-16 season.
Embiid, the team’s 2014 first-round pick, missed last season with a fractured navicular bone in the foot. He underwent his first surgery before the NBA draft, but Sam Hinkie and the Sixers still selected him with the third overall pick, sticking to their best player available strategy.
The 7-footer didn’t re-injure the bone, but a CT scan in June showed it was healing slower than expected. After repetitive doctor visits, the Sixers and Embiid deemed surgery as the best course of action.
In an interview this week with Comcast SportsNet’s John Clark, former Sixer and TNT basketball analyst Charles Barkley shared his thoughts on the Embiid situation.
“I’m very concerned and I’m very disappointed in the Sixers,” Barkley said. “I don’t know all the ins and outs — I don’t understand how you do that surgery and you’re not checking in periodically. You wait a whole year before you realize the surgery wasn’t successful.
“Maybe I’m just wrong, but it seems to me like every couple of months, they should have been doing something to check on his foot to see how it’s progressing. I don’t understand how you wait an entire year and then realize his foot is not healing properly. I have to blame the Sixers for that fiasco.”