Bryan Colangelo just got off the phone with WIP’s Carlin and Reese, and when I tuned in partly into the conversation, Carlin was pushing Colangelo on injuries, timelines, and transparency. After saying that he couldn’t divulge that much information due to HIPAA privacy laws on Embiid, and then again on Simmons, Bryan got testy:

He said that if Joel Embiid wants to play in the Rising Stars Challenge on All-Star Weekend, he’d have to play in a regular season NBA game first. Simmons, he said, wants to play basketball very badly, but they won’t put him out there until he is fully healthy and ready. He came one step shy of dismissing Bob Cooney’s “Simmons’ agent wants him to sit out the year” report as “fake news.” After moving on to trade deadline talk, Colangelo tossed some soft shade at the Noel/Okafor/Embiid logjam:

“At the end of the day,” Colagelo said, “we’re taking pragmatic steps towards building this team.” He didn’t expect – in any way – to make the playoffs this year, but stressed that while there are no timelines (dude really hates timelines) he has a clear, three-year vision for this team. I just hope his vision is clearer than his injury diagnoses.