Letting down Joel Embiid

It's easy to pinpoint Philly's downfall on Doc Rivers' failure to get Embiid off the floor sooner in Toronto. Daryl Morey's trade for James Harden, in truth, might have inflicted longer-term damage

The Philadelphia 76ers' season, for the 21st consecutive season, ended before the conference finals.

Which means that the blame game is well underway.

Doc Rivers, not surprisingly, has already absorbed a good chunk of it. Rivers' failure to pull Joel Embiid from Philadelphia's Round 1-clinching Game 6 victory in Toronto, when leading by 29 points with less than five minutes to go, left Embiid exposed to the Pascal Siakam elbow that caused an orbital fracture near Embiid’s right eye. The injury knocked Embiid out of the first two games of the Sixers' second-round series against Miami and clearly left him well shy of full capacity in both Game 5 (Miami won in a 35-point rout) and Game 6 (Philadelphia was eliminated on its own floor by a 99-90 defeat that never felt that close in the second half).

It's a mistake that might haunt Rivers more than any of the three blown 3-1 playoff leads in his past that Doc's detractors are prone to dredge up at times like these. Could the Sixers have won this series with Embiid at his pre-mask levels? This much is certain: Miami is clearly too good, even without the injured Kyle Lowry, to be spotted two games in a best-of-7 series.

A better question, perhaps, is this one: Is Rivers really the Philly powerbroker who let Embiid down the most this season?

Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey, with his ongoing devotion to James Harden, has no less to answer for than his coach.

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