The important Philadelphia detail is not that the Sixers will patch center together. It is that they already have.
Joel Embiid being ruled out for Game 1 in Boston means Andre Drummond is no longer sitting in the background as emergency depth. He is the first version of the answer. The play-in win over Orlando made that plain: Drummond and Adem Bona split the middle, and the split looked credible enough that Nick Nurse openly praised it afterward.
That matters because playoff injury stories can drift into abstraction. A team is "waiting on its star," and everything else becomes filler. This one is more concrete. Drummond had 14 points and 10 rebounds against Orlando, which is the kind of line that suggests real control over the game’s physical terms. Bona’s three blocks showed the second half of the plan, the change-of-pace version that can alter the look when Philadelphia needs more activity.
But if the question is who sets the first tone, it is Drummond. He is the sturdier, more traditional option, and right now that steadiness is the Sixers’ best chance to make the Embiid absence feel survivable rather than overwhelming.
The committee is real, but the order matters. Philadelphia’s opening bet is that Drummond can hold the floor long enough for the rest of the series to become a basketball problem instead of an injury one.