The Sixers beat the Hornets in Charlotte on Monday night for their 8th win of the season.

37.5% of their victories this year are against the Hornets.

Before the game, Nick Nurse provided some good news. Joel Embiid’s sinus fracture is not as bad as the first two facial fractures he suffered. This is from Steve Reed at The Associated Press:

Embiid was injured in the first half of Friday night’s 121-107 loss to the Indiana Pacers when he was hit in the face by Bennedict Mathurin while going for a defensive rebound.

The 76ers said Embiid will be reevaluated in one week.

…

“The only thing that I can compare it to, but I wasn’t here, but he certainly had those other ones that were a lot worse,” Nurse said before the Hornets game. “It’s not nearly as severe as those two from what they tell me. So I guess that’s good because those were pretty tough — those two — and they say it’s not as bad as that.”

That’s good, because the first two were pretty gnarly.

The first fracture took place in 2018, when the Sixers were riding a long winning streak into their first playoff appearance in more than a half decade. Markelle Fultz was running a simple DHO with Embiid, who bobbled the ball, leaned over, and took a shoulder to the face. He missed the first two games of the Miami series and came back wearing a mask for round two against Boston.


The second one was in 2022, during the Toronto playoff series, when Pascal Siakam elbowed him driving to the rim. There was a relatively large portion of people who thought it was intentional or dirty from Embiid’s Cameroonian countryman, but the more ridiculous thing was Doc Rivers having Embiid in the game with less than four minutes remaining while the Sixers were up 29. Yeah, it was the playoffs, and not some throwaway regular season game, but Doc took a lot of criticism for that.

Anyway, not sure if you’ve looked at the standings lately, but the Sixers are only 1.5 games out of the 10th spot and a play-in game. The East has largely been dreck this season, with the Cavs and Celtics playing great basketball, but a huge drop off to the Knicks, Magic, and everyone else.