The Philadelphia 76ers were fined $100,000 after the NBA investigated their handling of Joel Embiid’s injury when it came to disclosing his status, deciding the team violated the league’s rules. According to ESPN’s Tim Bontemps, the league took Philadelphia’s history as a repeat offender into account.
For background, there were multiple media reports that Embiid could make his return to the court Tuesday, April 2 against the Thunder in a nationally televised game on TNT. These weren’t official statements from the Sixers, but did come from notable NBA insiders who generally get this type of thing right. However, the team listed Embiid as out when it had to disclose its first injury report at 5 p.m. ET on the day before the game.
Embiid remained out on every subsequent injury report update Tuesday until just after head coach Nick Nurse held his media availability, saying the center was questionable. Keep in mind the 76ers also said Embiid did not participate in the team’s morning shootaround. Embiid was then listed as available at 7 p.m. ET, 30 minutes before tip.
How prevalent is misrepresentation of injuries?
Some teams are notorious for doing this, although nothing has quite risen to this level. Players can receive one of five designations: out, doubtful, questionable, probable and available. The 76ers could’ve easily avoided this scenario by listing Embiid as doubtful on their first report instead of out. Players can also be deemed “game-time decisions”, which means the team buys itself some additional time before making a ruling on a player.
The Thunder actually pulled a similar tactic with star point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander on March 31, listing him as out on the previous day’s first injury report ahead of a game against the Knicks. However, Oklahoma City upgraded SGA to questionable and said he was at the team’s morning shootaround, suggesting he would make his return which he did.
How injury reporting works
The league states a team must disclose injuries at 5 p.m. local time the day before the game unless it is on a back-to-back set. If a team is on a back-to-back, it must disclose injuries by 1 p.m. local time the day of the game. Let’s say a team, like the 76ers, is playing on Wednesday and Thursday in a given week. The team will need to disclose the first injury report for Wednesday’s game at 5 p.m. ET Tuesday, and keep updating that until tip. The team will then need to disclose Thursday’s first injury report at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.
If you’re familiar with injury reports, which are available here, you’ll see that the league releases them every hour but at the half-hour mark. This creates the obvious problem of a team potentially giving out the information at 1 p.m. ET, but the actual report not showing up publicly until 1:30 p.m. ET. The simple fix here would be to just have the league release its reports at the top of every hour. But that’s secondary to what the actual issue is.
Why injury misrepresentation is a problem for all sports
Injury concealment is not limited to the NBA. The Falcons failed to report running back Bijan Robinson’s illness, comically sitting him out for most of a game until the final drive. The Bengals failed to say Joe Burrow was dealing with an injury ahead of a Thursday night game, one where he suffered a season-ending wrist injury. Although Cincinnati was cleared of any violations, there was a video showing Burrow having some sort of protective wrap on his hand/wrist ahead of the contest.
There’s gamesmanship in every sport. That’s not the problem here. The problem is the lack of transparency from the clubs in a world where sports gambling is extremely prevalent. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans wagered a little more than $119 billion on sports in 2023. The NBA’s salary cap for the 2022-23 season was $136 million, which represents .11% of that amount. The media rights deal the league signed in 2014 was worth $24 billion over nine years, which comes out to about $2.67 billion per year. That’s a sizable amount, but it’s not comparable to the sports betting number.
According to the league’s partnership report, it had $1.4 billion in sponsorships in 2023. Sports Media Watch cites a CNBC report suggesting those around the NBA believe the league is seeking somewhere close to $75 billion for the new media rights deal, more than triple what it got in the last deal. The sports betting doesn’t compare to these numbers, where the league expects to generate about $167 million in revenue.
All these numbers lead to the salary cap rising per year, which means more money for teams to spend and more money for players to earn. Whether there’s an acceptance of sports betting and media compliance, there’s no debate as to how it has pushed salaries to the stratosphere. By disregarding the most basic rule, teams and players are hurting sports bettors and their media partners who want to showcase the league.
A secondary effect of this is when insiders get news ahead of time but the team doesn’t make the necessary changes on its report. A player might be deemed questionable but someone says he’s going to play in the game. That leads to bettors making wagers with this information and networks releasing various promotions to build up the matchup. Sometimes, this player can be ruled out. While the team isn’t in the wrong, there was an information exchange somewhere that wasn’t honest. It might be viewed as gamesmanship, but it goes a bit beyond that when it hurts a lot of wallets. Especially if those wallets don’t carry the dollar amount of most players in the league.
How the NBA fixes injury reporting
The first move is to release all reports at the top of each hour, aligning with the current policy. As someone who has covered a team in person before, here’s typically how a pregame routine works.
Teams will arrive at the stadium about two hours before the game. The visiting coach will speak around an hour and a half before the game, followed by the home team’s coach. The locker rooms are then open for the media, although players might be doing their pregame warmups. Although the players are supposed to be available, they rarely talk before a game. Most speak after a game.
The most obvious way to avoid anything like Embiid’s situation happening again is for the coach to deliver the team’s final injury report at this media availability. NFL teams release their inactives list about an hour and a half before kickoff, so why can’t NBA teams follow the same protocol? If we’re being real, no player is ever truly a game-time call. Most know whether they’re going to play or not long before the pregame warmup, which is often used as the determining measure for someone suiting up. And players have been late scratches before, so it’s not like teams don’t have an out in case something isn’t right. Unsurprisingly, Embiid was the most notable late scratch this season during a pregame warmup in Denver.
This would give bettors and networks a true deadline with the most accurate information, while still allowing teams to keep some cards close to their chest. These leagues are now worth billions of dollars after generating substantial revenue through their partnerships with sportsbooks and television networks. The least they can do is be honest about whether their players will suit up or not in a timely manner.
Because simply trusting the teams to do the right thing would be naive, there have to be more significant penalties. As mentioned, these teams are now worth billions of dollars. A $100k fine means nothing, especially if it means getting a slight edge in a crucial game late in the season. Teams are being fined second-round picks for tampering. Let’s fine teams a first-round pick for failing to report injuries on time. It’ll be the team’s next available first-round pick, so the pain will be immediate and more real. If that’s the penalty, you can bet these types of violations will disappear quickly.