A stray preseason report about Joel Embiid and LeBron James had the NBA talking, but Nick Nurse wasn’t buying the drama.
On Wednesday, the 76ers coach addressed the buzz around a claim that James had gotten on Embiid for being late to practice. Nurse made it clear he was caught off guard by the whole thing and pushed back on any suggestion that Embiid has been anything but locked in.
“I'm just surprised by [the report]. He's been excellent.
He's in great shape. He's been on the practice floor.
He's worked very hard and he looks really great. It just surprises me that something like that came out,” Nurse said.
The situation started during the first preseason game of the year, when New York Knicks announcer Mike Breen said on the air that he had heard Embiid walked out to the court a couple minutes late.
“They are, they're raving about how he's been so far. Obviously, it's only a week of camp. But I had somebody tell me before the game that they were out ready to practice and Joel Embiid walked out on the court a couple minutes late,” Breen said on the air.
That quickly turned into a league-wide story, with many taking it as a sign of trouble in Philadelphia. But James denied that anything like it happened, and Breen later walked it back.
“I don't know why the person who told me the story would make it up, but if LeBron says it never happened then I believe him and apologize for putting it out there,” Breen said.
Philadelphia moved to shut the whole thing down fast, and Nurse’s comments made it clear he’s not interested in letting a misread report stick to Embiid. The message from the 76ers is simple: the noise isn’t the story, and the team is sticking together.
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The early signs were encouraging enough to make the fit easy to picture: Brown gave Philadelphia a different kind of scoring option, one that can take some of the burden off the usual focal points and keep the offense from feeling so predictable. Preseason is still preseason, of course, but the larger question for the Sixers is whether Brown can turn one sharp outing into the kind of steady second engine this roster has often lacked. If he can, Philadelphias ceiling shifts in a hurry. [Read more 🡒]