LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. -- Philadelphia 76ers coach Brett Brown did his best to put on a brave face as he spoke to the media Thursday afternoon. But, in the wake of learning that All-Star Ben Simmons would be out indefinitely with a subluxation of his left patella, Brown couldn't help but admit the obvious frustration over the situation.

"This one stings, for sure," Brown said.

Simmons suffered the injury -- commonly referred to as a partial dislocation of the kneecap -- in the third quarter of Wednesday's 107-98 victory over the Washington Wizards. After he went up and grabbed an offensive rebound, he slowly dribbled to the corner in front of the Sixers' bench and flipped an inlet pass to Al Horford. As a while then blew to stop the play, Simmons turned, flexed his left leg, touched the back of it and then walked directly off the court and back to the team's locker room.

He was soon joined there by Sixers general manager Elton Brand, and was shown on television leaving the arena before the game ended in street clothes and walking very, very gingerly.

"I don't even remember [the injury] happening," Shake Milton said. "I just remember him walking off to the sidelines. Yeah, it's tough for us.

"Ben is an incredible player, an incredible athlete. ... he's like a freak. A super human. So, hopefully he's able to heal super fast and get back out on the court, because we need him."

The biggest question in Philadelphia now -- and, arguably, in the Eastern Conference -- is when, or if, Philadelphia will see Simmons walking onto a basketball court again here inside the NBA's bubble at the Walt Disney World Resort. Brown said that the Sixers should know within the next 24 hours what the next steps for Simmons will be -- the team said in its statement Thursday that treatment options were being considered.

But if Philadelphia wants to make the kind of deep playoff run it expected to entering the season, it will almost certainly need Simmons on the court to do so.

"Yeah, it's a little frustrating sometimes," guard Josh Richardson said of losing Simmons. "But that's the way the game goes. So, we're going to just have to have a next man up mentality like we've had all year. Guys will pick up the slack, and when we get him back, he'll fit back in seamlessly.

"Ben is an All-Star, so he's not going to be easy to replace, but the rest of our team will do as good of a job as we can."

One immediate adjustment, Brown said, is that Al Horford and Joel Embiid are going to be playing together on a much more regular basis. Brown was asked about whether he would continue to try split the two big men up as much as possible without Simmons, or if he would try to play them together, and Brown said his lean was to play them together.

With Simmons shifting to power forward, and Milton playing at point guard and replacing Horford in the starting lineup, Brown has only played Horford and Embiid together in short bursts. But when Simmons has been in foul trouble during the seeding games -- and when he wasn't available at all in the fourth quarter Wednesday due to his injury -- Horford has been on the court in his place.

"If I had to tilt one way or another, I will pair them," Brown said. "I think there are ways, I'm not saying you can do it all, but we've played around in game planning and spitballed what this actually looks like now. If you made me weigh one area or the other, I would pair them."

Regardless, Simmons has already been ruled out for Friday's game against the Orlando Magic, and it seems unlikely he will return in the short term. After Simmons suffered a back injury in the first quarter of Philadelphia's loss in Milwaukee on Feb. 22 -- an injury that occurred in an eerily similar manner to this one -- it was unclear whether he was going to be available for the playoffs then. He didn't play again before the season was shut down in March, and both sides have been coy about whether he could have played in the playoffs had the season gone on as scheduled.

Now, though, the Sixers are staring at the possibility of going into the playoffs dealing with injuries once again -- just as they have each of the past two seasons. In the meantime, they will wait and see what the prognosis on Simmons is -- and, depending on what it is, whether he'll be able to rejoin them before the playoffs are over.

"We all felt like, you know, with the pandemic and are we going to play again, this obviously bought time for Ben," Brown said. "And, had the season kept going, it was anybody's best guess.

"In relation to sort of being incredibly down about it, I'm not. When I think too long about it, probably, I can go there, but I feel numb to it. I feel conditioned, that we've gone through this type of thing before. There is a level of faith I have in the rest of the team that we can hold the fort until we can get hopefully him back."