Jake Fischer from Yahoo! Sports sat down for an interview with Joel Embiid. In the article, Joel talked about fans wanting to trade him, and as a result everyone on Philly sports Twitter has been collectively freaking out and pointing fingers at each other. All they saw was this Bleacher Report tweet, which provides little to no context:

Here was the excerpt from Fischer’s article, which provides some actual context:

He was then asked to deliver a message, to the segment of Philadelphia’s fan base that has found cause for panic, that is pounding their timeline to remove Rivers and wants to declare that the trade that landed Harden is already a failure.

“I don’t know,” Embiid said, shrugging. “Sixers fans, they want to trade me.” The 28-year-old grinned wide, his breathy laugh filling the space. There’s that twinkle in Embiid’s eye when he’s ready to unwind and talk.

So here is where our brief conversation, lightly edited and condensed for clarity, truly begins.

You don’t believe that.

Embiid: I do believe that. They want to trade me.

They don’t all want to trade you. They want certain people to, uh, be relieved of their duties and, uh, certain people to depart the franchise.

Embiid: Look, all I can do is try to do my best every game. I’m grateful to be in this position, because it’s not an easy job. If it was easy, everybody would do it.

There you go everybody. Grinned and laughed. It’s now all water under the bridge. Though the bot problem on Twitter is so out of hand that I wouldn’t be shocked if the Boston Celtics organization is creating accounts disguised as Sixers fans to constantly harass Embiid about the Sixers trading him. Ime Udoka has a lot of time on his hands.

Here’s another thing –

Are you really a Sixers fan if you haven’t at least talked about trading Embiid in your group chat or with people at work? We’ve all thought about what it’d look like. It’s like that Bill Burr bit that we all have fucked up thoughts:

I’ve had fucked up thoughts about trading Joel Embiid, but I’d never do it. It’s what makes me a functioning psycho. When those thoughts start to creep back into my mind I just type “Joel Embiid” into the search bar on Twitter instead of tweeting out a hot take and I’m snapped back to reality: