The Sixers only had seven players ready to take the court in their loss to the Nuggets on Jan. 9, a strange byproduct of the ongoing strangeness of playing sports in a global pandemic.
Sixers head coach Doc Rivers didn't seem pleased by the league's insistence that the team still play the game despite being so shorthanded, and now the Sixers' face of the franchise is calling out the league for a perceived double standard.
The NBA postponed the Celtics' game against the Heat on Sunday because the Heat did not meet the eight-player minimum due to ongoing contact tracing with the team.
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Sounds... a whole lot like the Sixers' situation on Saturday, doesn't it?
Unsurprisingly, Joel Embiid was not a fan of the league's decision to make the Sixers play but postpone the Celtics' game:
No one is more Joel than Joel.
And look, there will be sticklers who point out that the Sixers were able to receive a number of negative tests for players before tipoff, and with Mike Scott technically able to dress, the team had the requisite eight players, while the Celtics were still dealing with ongoing contact tracing efforts.
NBA
But if you can't look at these two very similar situations, which happened on back to back days, and realize that this wasn't exactly fair, I don't know what to tell you.
The NFL ran into similar problems this past season when some teams were forced to play shorthanded, like the Broncos using an emergency quarterback, while other teams were able to postpone games until players were recovered, like the Ravens in Week 12.
It's an unfortunate reality of playing professional sports during the pandemic: things aren't always going to be neat.
But that doesn't mean they're not also unfair.