In the months leading up to the 2014 draft, no NBA franchise scouted the basketball team at the University of Kansas more vigorously than the Cleveland Cavaliers.
The Cavs were coming off a tumultuous season, their fourth straight missing the playoffs, and still reeling from LeBron James’s decision four years earlier to bolt for Miami. Cavs owner Dan Gilbert responded by firing his general manager (Chris Grant) and his head coach (Mike Brown). He then handed the keys to an NBA lifer named David Griffin. Griffin had broken into the NBA twenty-one years earlier as an intern with the Phoenix Suns. By 2007 he was senior vice president of basketball operations in Phoenix. In 2010 he left for a similar job with the Cavaliers, and now he was running the show. With the Cavaliers miraculously winning the draft lottery, despite entering the evening with just a 1.7 percent chance of landing the No. 1 pick, he’d have his choice among three players grouped together at the top of most draft boards: Duke forward Jabari Parker and Kansas teammates Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid.
But first, Griffin needed a head coach. He tried pitching Bill Self, the head coach at Kansas, on the gig. Self declined the offer, but he shared his candid thoughts on his two star prospects. Self believed that Wiggins had All-Star potential. But the 7-foot-1 Embiid, Self said, was the sort of talent that comes around once in a generation, the kind of player who could change a franchise. After spending so much time around Kansas, Griffin and the Cavaliers had come to agree. The only question mark about Embiid was the stress fracture he had suffered in his lower back a few months earlier.
On a Monday night a little less than two weeks before the draft, Embiid arrived in Cleveland to work out for the Cavaliers. He met the team the next morning at their practice facility in Independence, Ohio. Griffin tasked Vitaly Potapenko, a 6-foot-10 assistant coach and former NBA player, to defend the nimble Embiid in the post. The Cavs figured Embiid would have no issue dancing around the older (thirty-nine) and slower Potapenko. But then he began throwing the 275-pound Potapenko “around like a rag doll,” an onlooker said. He powered through him and easily moved him off the block. “The strength he had was mind-numbing,” the onlooker said. Any worries about Embiid’s back were dispelled.
The Cavs moved Embiid to the midrange. His jumper was fluid and smooth. He finished the workout by stepping out behind the three-point line. He splashed his first shot from behind the arc.
“How could you not draft me No. 1?” he shouted at Griffin.
He swished another.
“Look how good I am!”
Another ripped through the net.
“You need me, Griff!”
A fourth make.
“Come on, Griff, you gotta draft me!”
A fifth.
“I’m so good!”
A sixth.
“I gotta be No. 1!”
A seventh.
“How can you not take me?”
Smiles swept across the faces of Griffin and the rest of the Cavaliers brain trust. Griffin would later tell people that it was the best workout he’d ever seen. “He was like the second coming of Hakeem,” he’d say. His mind was made. “He told us there he was taking Joel No. 1,” said Francois Nyam, one Embiid’s agents at the time.
Embiid went to dinner that night with some Cavaliers decision makers. While devouring three orders of chocolate lava cake, he lobbed all sorts of questions at the executives sitting across from him, from X’s and O’s to asking why the Cavaliers had retired jerseys hanging above their practice court. He cracked jokes. He was polite. He made eye contact. “He was radically more engaged than most kids who come in for those things,” said one attendee. The Cavs were smitten.
The next morning, Embiid awoke in his hotel room with his right foot screaming. “I can’t walk,” he told Nyam. About a week earlier, Bismack Biyombo, a Hornets forward from the Congo who was repped by the same agency, had landed on the foot during a workout in Santa Monica. Embiid told his agents he “felt something.” They had all assumed it was just a sprain or bruise, but now they feared that it was more serious. Embiid pulled himself out of bed, laced up his sneakers, and limped into the Cleveland Clinic for his physical. He jogged on a treadmill for a few minutes, but the pain was too much. He underwent an X-ray. A thin stress fracture was discovered in the middle of his right foot.
The news began trickling out the next day. Sixers staffers, watching a draft workout from the sidelines that morning at PCOM, were giddy as they passed it along to one another. The team hadn’t met with Embiid. But a few weeks earlier Hinkie had attended a workout put on by Embiid’s agents in Santa Monica. He and his staff had also scouted enough of Embiid’s games to recognize what it was that Griffin and the Cavaliers saw.
Later that day, Hinkie visited Brown’s office. “Embiid got injured in Cleveland today,” he said. “He might be available to us (at No. 3).”
On June 20, six days before the draft, a surgeon at the Southern California Orthopedic Institute inserted two screws into Embiid’s fractured navicular bone to meld the crack. Embiid’s agent, Arn Tellem, released a statement from the operating doctor, Richard Ferkel: “The surgery went very well and I’m confident that after appropriate healing he will be able to return to NBA Basketball.”
That wasn’t good enough for the Cavaliers. Griffin had a mandate from ownership to win and needed a player who could immediately help the team. Even if he wanted to take Embiid, the Cavaliers’ doctors wouldn’t give him the green light. The Bucks, meanwhile, had locked in on Parker, another Tellem client, at No. 2, and anyway, Embiid had no interest in playing there. “That place is corny,” he hold Nyam. What he really wanted was to fall to the Lakers at No. 7. He’d been living in Los Angeles and grown comfortable in the city. “Work your magic,” he told Tellem. Tellem knew there was no chance of Embiid plunging that far, so instead he and Nyam sold Embiid on Philadelphia. Tellem had grown up there. Nyam had moved there to play high school basketball. It took a bit, but Embiid bought in.
If the Sixers wanted him, he was theirs.
* * *
Joel Embiid is fond of comparing his life to a movie. The story, in his account, begins with a scout discovering him on the streets of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where Embiid grew up. It’s a good opening scene, but not exactly true.
The story actually begins with an email.
“Best wishes brother!!!” Didier Yanga wrote to Joe Touomou in January 2011. “I’m sending you pictures of my nephew…Thomas’ son, who is 2m06 tall and 17 years old. He’s in 11th grade.”
Eighteen months earlier, Yanga’s nephew Joel Embiid had watched his first NBA game, a Finals matchup between Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers and Dwight Howard’s Orlando Magic. Joel had grown up around sports. He excelled in volleyball, was an avid soccer fan, and also the son of a professional handball player. Yet something about the NBA spectacle was different.
“I had never seen anything like that,” Embiid recalled. “The way they moved, and the athleticism, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I had that moment like, I just wanna do that.” He found a run-down hoop nearby and started playing regularly. “Kobe!” he’d shout after each shot. He’d extend his right wrist and freeze it in the air, just like he’d seen on TV.
He begged his parents to let him play. “But my brother wanted Joel to have excellent grades and not be distracted by anything else,” Yanga said. Thomas served as a colonel in the Cameroon military. His three kids knew his edicts were not to be violated, and his wife, Christine, was just as strict, forcing Joel to memorize his school notes before playing outside and forbidding him from staying up late to watch NBA games. “I didn’t even have any friends because all I ever did was sleep and do homework,” Embiid recalled.
As Joel grew older he became more rebellious. After school he’d arrange a bunch of highlighted textbooks on his family’s kitchen table and slip out to a nearby soccer field. He’d play until spotting his mom’s Mercedes driving down the street, then dash back, hide his sneakers, and greet her from behind a stack of study materials.
Thomas and Christine planned for Joel to leave for France after high school, where he’d enroll at the National Institute of Sport and Physical Education. He’d continue his volleyball training—a sport they understood—and maybe earn a spot on Cameroon’s national team. Thomas had followed this path and look at the life he now lived: Three beautiful children. A spacious home. A wife driving a Mercedes. The family even employed a maid.
But Joel didn’t care about any of that. What he cared about, what he wanted, was to play basketball, to be like Kobe. Slowly, Thomas began reconsidering his stance. He reached out to his brother, who had played some high-level amateur basketball in the Ivory Coast and coached a bit too. Yanga wasn’t an expert, but he knew enough to recognize the potential in his 6-foot-7 volleyball-playing nephew. He thought of an old friend of his, a man named Joe Touomou, one of the few bridges between Cameroon’s cracked courts and America’s lavish gyms. Touomou had grown up with Thomas and Yanga before leaving to attend Georgetown on a basketball scholarship. He was the first Cameroonian ever to play Division I and had worked as an international scout for the Indiana Pacers. He was the perfect person to illustrate all the opportunities basketball could provide.
Yanga explained the situation to Touomou, then sent him pictures of Joel posing in front of a doorway, to accentuate his height. Touomou received the photos on a Saturday afternoon. He saw how tall Joel was. He knew how athletic Joel’s father was. He booked a flight to Cameroon and a few weeks later was in the Embiid home handing Joel a gym bag stuffed with leftovers from a previous camp—basketball jerseys, shorts, and a size 16 pair of white sneakers.
Thomas and Christine told Joel to wait upstairs. They sat with Touomou in the living room. Touomou began by explaining the potential he believed Joel possessed. He said he knew a local coach who could help him harness all that potential.
“Joel is stubborn,” an unmoved Thomas said.
“All he wants to do is play sports,” said Christine. “He needs to focus on school.”
“Basketball can get him into the best schools,” Touomou responded.
He was armed with examples. Look at Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje, he said, the first Cameroonian to ever play in the NBA. And look at Luc Mbah a Moute, an NBA forward whose father, in a similar conversation eight years earlier, Touomou had swayed. Both, thanks to basketball, had earned college scholarships.
The three spoke for more than an hour. Touomou could tell that the education pitch had softened Thomas and Christine. He told them to think it over, that he’d be back soon. Two days later, he returned to the Embiid home. Joel sat with them this time, and Christine served food. She and Thomas told Touomou that Joel could play, as long as he promised to remain focused on his academics. Joel looked on quietly, hiding his excitement.
In February, Thomas signed paperwork allowing Joel to join a local team led by a coach named Guy Moudio. Moudio gave Joel a tape of Hall of Fame center Hakeem Olajuwon to study. He used a medicine ball to build up Joel’s strength. Moudio had to teach Joel some of the game’s more basic skills, but he was impressed with what he saw and how Joel, despite being a novice, seemed to have an innate feel for the game. He mentioned his new pupil to Francois Nyam, a former French professional basketball player whose father was from Cameroon. Nyam was a cousin of Mbah a Moute’s and had since become a fixture in the country’s basketball community. He and Mbah a Moute were opening a basketball camp in Cameroon; that summer five attendees would earn an invite to Basketball Without Borders, a program organized by the NBA with the intention of spreading the sport across the world. An invite there was an opportunity to audition in front of a group of people with the power to fulfill the loftiest of dreams.
Joel was invited to participate, but while getting dressed on the morning of the camp’s first day, he began thinking about all the players he’d be competing against. They were so advanced and he was still so raw. Anxiety overcame him. He spent the day at home playing video games with his younger brother instead.
The next morning, Moudio showed up at the Embiids’ house. This was Joel’s chance, and Moudio wasn’t going to let nerves ensnare his prize pupil. He ushered Joel to the Yaoundé Sports Palace, and for most of the camp Joel was overmatched. “He couldn’t catch a basketball, dribble, or anything,” Nyam said. But like Moudio before, Nyam and Mbah a Moute were both impressed with the way Joel absorbed the game. “You could show him something completely new and he’d pick it up after, like, three tries,” Nyam said. That was all the group needed to see. About a month later, Joel was standing on a court in Johannesburg surrounded by a group of NBA coaches and some of Africa’s top prospects. He was skinny and raw, but also tall and agile. “His feet,” said Monty Williams, a former NBA player who worked as a coach for that camp, “were unreal.”
Impressed, Mbah a Moute and Nyam arranged for Joel to enroll as a junior at Montverde Academy in Florida, Mbah a Moute’s alma mater and home to one of the country’s top high school basketball programs. In September, Thomas and Christine drove Joel to Yaoundé Nsimalen International Airport. Joel was scared, but excited too. He barely spoke English, but he recognized the opportunity in front of him. He hugged his family, not knowing when he’d see them next, and boarded the plane.
* * *
Joel showed up to his first Montverde practice unsure what to expect. He watched his teammates, some of the best high school players in the country, kids who had spent years honing their skills, drill jumpers and glide across the court while he fumbled passes and dribbled the ball off his feet. On defense he didn’t know where to stand. On offense he didn’t know how to cut.
“He was new to everything,” said Luc Mbah a Moute’s younger brother, Roger Moute a Bidias, one of his Montverde teammates.
Joel’s teammates taunted and teased him. He was an easy target. He was tall, but “really, really skinny,” Moute a Bidias said. His English was limited to “good morning,” and whatever lyrics he’d picked up from Bow Wow and Kanye West. His spoke with a heavy accent. He didn’t have friends.
Montverde head coach Kevin Boyle blew his whistle, bringing practice to a halt. He was able to look past the mistakes, to see something his players couldn’t. He told Embiid to get some water. Embiid stepped out of the gym. Boyle turned to his team.
“You laugh now, but in five years you are all going to go to Joel to borrow money because he’s going to be rich,” he yelled.
In his dorm room afterward, Joel collapsed onto his bed. His eyes welled with tears.
What am I even doing here? he wondered. He thought about calling his parents, about asking to come home. Maybe his mom and dad were right.
But then he thought about his soccer games back in Cameroon and how he’d always relished those moments when his team was down. He believed that’s when he played his best. He was always competitive. This—exacting some sort of revenge on his teammates, beating them in practice—would just be his latest challenge.
He began studying Moudio’s tape of Olajuwon every night and then practicing the moves the next day. During lunch breaks he’d seek out Boyle and ask for extra coaching. During free moments he typed “White People Shooting 3 Pointers” into the search box on YouTube so he could learn proper shooting mechanics from a group of people that he had discerned to be the best.
“I know it’s a stereotype, but have you ever seen a normal, thirty-year-old white guy shoot a three-pointer?” Embiid recalled. “That elbow is tucked, man. The knees are bent. The follow-through is perfect. Always.”
Slowly, his game improved. He suited up for a few JV games and played well. He realized he wasn’t so far behind. His confidence grew. He remained shy around his teammates, but they no longer intimidated him. When hanging out with Moute a Bidias or the small group of fellow African teammates he mostly interacted with, his personality began breaking through. He’d beat friends in FIFA and then spend the rest of the day reminding them of his victory, and that mentality carried over into practices. If Dakari Johnson, a stud center ranked seventh in his class by ESPN, threw an elbow, Joel would reciprocate the next trip down, often forcing Boyle to jump in to prevent punches from being thrown.
Joel finished the season strongly, then linked up with a high-profile Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team called the Florida Rams. “He’d do 360 dunks during warm-ups,” said Chris Walker, a Rams teammate. Once, during a game in Atlanta, Joel dunked on an opponent, looked at the bench, and started dancing.
“We were like, ‘Did that guy who never talks just do a shimmy?’” Walker said.
Joel’s name began popping on college recruitment lists. He cracked ESPN’s top-100 list. The Division I scholarship offers would soon be flying in. The problem was that as long as Johnson was enrolled at Montverde, Joel would be relegated to a reserve role.
Nyam poked around Florida’s basketball community. Friends suggested he reach out to Justin Harden, the basketball coach at The Rock School, up in Gainesville. In April, Harden was told he might be hearing from Mbah a Moute about a talented kid who was looking for a new home. Harden did some research and called some friends. One was Norm Roberts, a Kansas assistant whose son had played for Harden. Roberts had seen Montverde play earlier that year.
“I’d take that kid in a heartbeat,” he told Harden.
Three months later, Harden was parked outside a Walmart with his two young sons sleeping in his Sonata’s backseat when Mbah a Moute finally called. The two chatted for about twenty minutes. Harden told him about his program and coaching style. Mbah a Moute explained Joel’s situation.
“He didn’t want Joel to have a free ride,” Harden said. “He just wanted him to have the opportunity to play through mistakes.”
Both men liked what they heard. Joel was spending the summer with the Mbah a Moute family in Milwaukee, where Luc was playing and living. In October, a few days before the start of school, Harden and his wife picked Joel up at Gainesville Regional Airport. They drove to a local Moe’s Southwest Grill to share a bite. Joel, who was consuming thousands of calories a day—he tasted Nutella that summer for the first time and spent afternoons gorging on spoonfuls straight from the jar—ordered “the biggest burrito they had,” Harden said.
Harden talked to Joel about the team and the school and told him about the couple, a local State Farm agent and retired preschool teacher, who’d be hosting him. A few weeks later, Joel took the court for his first practice.
“He was mesmerizing,” Harden said. “I had never seen anyone able to move that gracefully.”
He was still learning the game. He was often whistled for setting illegal screens (he’d spread his legs out past his shoulders and use his knees) and jumping over opponents’ backs for rebounds. But those watching closely started seeing the signs of something special. Joel had immersed himself in basketball over the summer, sometimes even dribbling up and down Milwaukee’s streets on afternoons when he couldn’t get to a court. But there was more to it. “You could see a brilliance there,” Harden said. Joel picked up new plays easily. He effortlessly adapted them to counter defenses in ways Harden hadn’t previously conceived. He often did so during practices, just moments after seeing Harden demonstrate the play for the first time.
By this point, Joel’s English had improved. But outside of a few African teammates who he felt comfortable joking with—“We relied on each other,” said teammate Alain Chigha—he mostly kept to himself. “In Cameroon, if you’re 6-foot-10, people make fun of you,” Nyam said. “It made him an introvert.” The questions lobbed at him from classmates about Cameroon bothered him. “They thought I grew up poor, in the jungle, killing lions,” Embiid said. He missed his family and hated living under another family’s roof. His new school’s stricter academic standards bothered him. He spent most of his free time alone in his bedroom, playing FIFA and Call of Duty.
Occasionally that attitude infected his play. Harden pulled him during the team’s semifinal matchup “because he looked like he didn’t care.” In other moments, a new character revealed himself. Joel challenged teammates to one-on-one games. He bombarded them with trash talk. Once, in a scrimmage toward the end of the season, he got tangled with Glenn Feidanga, a 6-foot-8, 230-pound senior. Feidanga whiffed on a punch. Joel, while being pulled backwards by Harden and teammates, unleashed a kick that grazed Feidanga’s face.
“Sometimes he looked pissed off at the world,” Harden said. “He did not have a great experience with us.”
It didn’t matter. Joel had enrolled at The Rock School so that he could land on the radars of college basketball’s biggest programs, so that he could earn a shot at the NBA. He had done just that.
* * *
In September, Roberts dragged Kansas head coach Bill Self to Gainesville for an open scrimmage.
“Wow, he’s tall,” Self said as Joel walked onto The Rock School’s practice court.
He and Roberts watched Joel shoot around and run up and down the floor. The footwork stood out, but other than that, Roberts was worried Joel hadn’t done enough to sell his boss. He missed some jumpers. He was pushed out by his meatier teammates. He failed to assert himself.
After the practice, Roberts turned to Self.
“What do you think?”
Self looked around to make sure none of the other college coaches present were listening. He paused a moment.
“In two years that kid’s going to be the No. 1 pick in the draft,” he said. “From now on, don’t recruit anyone harder than him.”
It didn’t take long for other schools to catch on. Louisville head coach Rick Pitino visited The Rock School early in the season. So did Florida’s Billy Donovan. Texas’s Rick Barnes, Virginia’s Tony Bennett, and Marquette’s Buzz Williams joined the chase.
That October, Kansas invited Joel to its Lawrence campus for an official visit. He watched the team scrimmage, shot around with some players, and threw down a windmill dunk. He ate dinner—which included a dessert request of two orders of chocolate cake—with Self and the team. The group was taken aback by how quiet Joel was. Justin Wesley, a junior guard who served as Joel’s host for the weekend, told Embiid there was a frat party they could attend.
“What’s a frat?” Joel asked.
At the party that night, Wesley asked Joel what he wanted to drink.
“Can I get a Shirley Temple?” Joel asked.
“A what?” Wesley asked.
“A Shirley Temple.”
Wesley had no idea how to make one. He hunted down a pledge to look it up and find the proper ingredients. In the meantime, Joel had all sorts of questions: What was the campus like? What were the girls on campus like? What was Self like? How hard did you have to work? How good could he get?
“He was kind of naïve,” Wesley said. “He was clearly still getting used to the American culture, and he really didn’t know much about the college basketball scene.”
Kansas had purposely invited Joel on the weekend of Midnight Madness, the official start of the NCAA basketball season. Many schools turn the date into a pep rally. Kansas billed the event Late Night in the Phog.
Joel showed up at Allen Fieldhouse around 6 p.m. Rabid fans dressed in blue and white filled all 16,300 seats. Music blared over the speakers and cheers filled the room. Some of Kansas’s players put on oversized tuxedo jackets and, standing at center court, danced to “Gangnam Style.” The team scrimmaged. Joel watched in awe.
“It was crazy,” he said. “We walked in there and everyone started clapping and yelling. I didn’t know what was going on. I was scared. I was like, ‘Are they clapping for us?’ I just looked down at the ground. I couldn’t believe it.”
Joel enrolled at Kansas the following summer, his fourth home in four years, and once again found himself feeling overwhelmed. He was now part of the billion-dollar business that is Division I college basketball. There were expectations, and stakes, and he wasn’t sure he could deliver. During a summer scrimmage with some teammates, Tarik Black, a thick 6-foot-9 senior, dunked over the top of him. That night Joel recalled looking up plane tickets home. A few weeks later, during the final day of the team’s ten-day conditioning boot camp, Joel, complaining of back pain, quit before completing the required number of suicides.
“You big baby,” Self barked. “Now you’re going to have to come back tomorrow and do it by yourself.” At the encouragement of his teammates, Joel repeated the drill, this time finishing. “But it all reminded him of when he had first come to Montverde,” Moute a Bidias said. In October, Kansas gathered for its first official practice. Once again Joel was shocked by the size of the players and speed of the game. After practice, he approached Self in his office.
“Coach, you’re going to have to redshirt me, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Are you kidding, Jo?” Self responded. “You’re going to end up being the best player we ever had.”
Self spent the first few months of the 2013–2014 season bragging about his freshman center to friends. He was sure he’d successfully wooed a kid who in two years would be the first player to hear his name called in the draft. Scouts, flooding Kansas’s gym to check out Andrew Wiggins and Wayne Selden, another projected first-rounder, were the first to inform Self that he was wrong.
“He’s already a lottery pick, and might even be No. 1 this year,” one told Self in the fall after watching a Kansas practice. “There’s no way he’s staying.”
To the public, Joel remained mostly unknown. It was Wiggins who was pegged as the draft’s most prized prospect, and it remained that way for the season’s early months. But Joel worked hard—he continued studying Olajuwon clips; sometimes he’d walk into the office of an assistant coach, pantomime a Dream Shake, and then walk out—and was inserted into the starting lineup in December. One game later, against New Mexico, he scored 18 points, two of them off a smooth drop step, set up by a shimmy.
“Olajuwon!” shouted ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla, calling the game courtside. Kansas won, 80–63.
After the game, Self pulled Roberts aside.
“We’re holding this kid back,” he told him. “He needs to start.”
Joel was a sponge, and growing faster than any player Self had ever coached. He saw things—angles, openings, reads—that others players didn’t even know to look for. Once, during a scrimmage, Joel, a teammate, and an opponent all chased a loose ball into the backcourt. Joel’s point guard came up with it and dribbled back up the floor. Joel sprinted to set a screen. Self, in awe, blew his whistle.
“Jo, why’d you go set that screen?” he asked, wondering if Joel would respond the way Self thought, and hoped, he would.
“Because the man is in the backcourt,” Joel said. “There’s no one here to help.”
Self smiled.
By January, Joel’s internal doubts had evaporated. His teammates noticed a difference in his demeanor. Earlier in the year, Self’s scrimmages, where fouls weren’t called and out-of-bounds violations didn’t exist, had disoriented him. Now “he was throwing elbows and taking advantage of those rules,” said former Kansas forward Andrew White. Joel punctuated baskets with shouts of “And one!” He screamed “Can’t guard me!” at seniors. He taunted teammates who failed to score on him.
“Everything changed for him at Kansas,” Nyam said. “You go from the tall kid everyone is making fun of to getting all the attention and being on ESPN and the cover of SLAM, it made him a different person.”
That confidence created a comfort, and that comfort pulled out a personality Joel had mostly kept hidden since arriving in the United States. He was still quiet and private. “He rarely talked about his family,” Justin Wesley said. But he was also funny and smart. He’d heighten his accent during interviews. If he got in trouble around campus, he’d respond by pretending his English was poor. He told coaches, teammates, and reporters that, as a child in Cameroon, as part of a tribal initiation, he’d pierced a lion with a spear (sometimes the story was tweaked so that he killed the lion with his hands). Never mind that he grew up in an upper-middle-class home, nowhere near a jungle. Joel liked how the tale mocked the stereotypes he believed others held about his home continent. He enjoyed how others never seemed quite sure if he was joking. “Americans have crazy ideas about Africa,” he recalled.
The fib made teammates laugh, but it also fit a trend of Embiid embellishing his backstory, one that would only grow more rampant in upcoming years, be it in magazine profiles or first-person essays. “My life is a movie,” he’d say often. Joel’s version didn’t mention his uncle or the role he played in connecting him to the NBA world. It often had him playing basketball for three months prior to receiving an invite to Mbah a Moute’s camp, when it was actually closer to six. It often claimed that the coaching at Basketball Without Borders was the first he’d ever received, erasing much of the sweat Moudio had put in. It featured the Olajuwon tape Moudio gave him, but almost never mentioned Moudio by name. Around this time, Joel also ceased speaking with Moudio, Touomou, and Yanga.
“At first it made me sad,” Yanga would say years later. “But not anymore. I did what I had to do. I have no regrets. In our traditions, Joel is my son, and I am happy that he succeeds, especially by the basketball that I practiced and that I continue to teach.”
In the meantime, Joel was cruising toward the draft’s top slot (averages of 11.2 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 2.6 blocks in 23 minutes a game) until suffering a stress fracture in his back in March. He was sidelined for the NCAA tournament, and watched Kansas fall in the round of 32. The injury was a blow, to Kansas but also to Joel. He’d rocketed up the draft board of every analyst and scout. He was a seven-footer with a 7-foot-5 wingspan who could shoot, and post up, and block shots, and move his feet. His package of skills was rare. But it was possible the injury would scare some teams away.
A couple weeks later Kansas called a press conference. Seated alongside Self behind a table draped in a blue cloth, Joel, speaking deliberately, announced his plan for the following season.
“After thinking a lot,” he said, “I decided to declare for the NBA draft.”
* * *
The Sixers spent the week leading up to the draft studying their options.
Going with Embiid was risky. His talent was obvious, but no one could say for certain when he’d return to the court, or, once he did, how long he’d last. Hinkie was never one to shy away from risk, but this was uncharted territory. It’d be dangerous for any team to bet its future on a big man with a bad back and flimsy feet—even more so for one full of borderline NBA players and coming off an ugly 19-win season. Hinkie would have other chances during the draft to improve the roster. Thanks to the previous year’s trade of Jrue Holiday for Nerlens Noel, as well as some incessant dealing, the Sixers also owned the draft’s 10th pick as well as a league-high five second-rounders. But the No. 3 pick was the crown jewel.
“One of the lights at the end of the tunnel all during the season—which was very hard, particularly down the stretch—was that we had two lottery picks coming,” Hinkie said. “Everybody’s all excited about that, and there was a bit of hype around that. It was all reasonable stuff about the cavalry’s coming.”
Drafting Embiid would neuter that cavalry. Without an immediate injection of talent from that No. 3 slot, the Sixers would likely spend another season in the league’s cellar, a result that would likely anger some fans, serve as ammo to Hinkie’s critics, and, despite their previous assurances otherwise, test the patience of ownership.
On the other hand, every one of Hinkie’s actions over the previous twelve months—the dumping of good players, the losing of games, the dumping of even more players, the losing of even more games—had been about creating an opportunity to nab a star, and that opportunity had now arrived. Hinkie spent the week leading up to the draft speaking to all sorts of specialists and looking up studies on navicular bone injuries. He was told that Embiid would need approximately five to eight months to recover. In other words, he’d miss the season. After that, the belief was that he’d be good to go.
A couple hours before the draft’s start, Hinkie called Self. “If you’re drafting in the top three, you need a guy who can lead a franchise,” he told Self, who was on his way to the draft. “Joel may be hurt, but he’s going to be the only guy left with a chance at becoming a franchise player.”
Later that evening, seated in his third-floor office, Hinkie watched NBA commissioner Adam Silver announce the draft’s first two picks. They went as expected—Wiggins No. 1 to Cleveland, Parker No. 2 to Milwaukee.
Five minutes later, Silver walked to the podium in Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. “With the third pick of the 2014 NBA draft, the Philadelphia 76ers select Joel Embiid,” he announced.
Joel, unable to travel due to the surgery, heard the news from a couch in Tellem’s home. His parents were seated beside him. He pumped both his fists. A smile filled his face.