Normally we don’t make threads on articles. But did you guys read that Joel article.

[Anerdyblackguy]

IT HAS TAKEN months to get here. Months of waiting, for Joel Embiid to play, for him not to play, for him to decide what, if anything, he wants to say about a season that once seemed so full of promise.

We're in his piano room. He's leaning back on a couch that seemed spacious until he eased his long body onto it. He's wearing a matching set -- pinstriped shorts and a camp collar shirt. His son, Arthur, peeks around corners from the hallway to see what we're up to. His wife, Anne de Paula, is upstairs preparing for her birthday celebration that evening. Decorations are being arranged in his dining room. It's the end of March, nine days before the knee surgery that will have a lot to say about Embiid's basketball fate.

He used to have fun with interviews. Before he ever played a game in the NBA, while he spent two years on the shelf rehabbing from surgeries to his right foot in the summers of 2014 and 2015, he was a media darling, both wry fabulist and helpless confessor.

But not after this past year. These days, he's wary, a little distracted by the Phillies game he's watching on his phone. I wonder if he might politely show me the door. We make small talk for a bit. He looks bored.

He does this with new people -- gives little of himself, pretends not to watch while he weighs and measures.

I ask if we can start, on the record. He agrees.

Embiid has many reasons to call this off. He thinks explaining himself will be distorted into defending himself, which will be caricatured as complaining. And look around -- his second child, a daughter, is on the way. His parents are taken care of. His family is secure for generations. He's an inspiration in Cameroon.

We're inside his lavish stone colonial, a mansion that sits perched atop a gently sloping hill in the Philadelphia suburbs. The hand towels in at least one of his 11 bathrooms are monogrammed with his initials -- what does he have to complain about?

"I care about how I'm going to be remembered when it comes to basketball, but not as a man," Embiid says. "As a man, you can't tell me nothing."

We're a few feet from each other, and I find myself edging forward in my chair to hear him. His voice is so small it seems to emphasize his other dimensions. This is the inward, solitary Joel Embiid, known by very few.

His friends are protective, verging on paranoid. They see Embiid as he sees himself, as someone beset on all sides. Which is to say, they love him on his terms.

"When you have his trust, it's kind of intoxicating," one says. "It's like you just penetrated this force field that nobody gets to be in."

So I ask him right away, "Who do you trust?"

"Hmm," Embiid says, seconds of silence passing by. "I mean, uhh."

He looks at me, a sharpening of his attention seems to ask: What do you think you know?

"I've never been the one to have a lot of friends," he says finally. "And even then, with the ones that I consider close, I never try to go deep into anything."

"Why?" I ask.

"A quiet family. Dad, extremely quiet. Mom, quiet too. ... From the moment that I was really young, you could never really open up about anything."

He expects me to understand. We're both from the same part of the world, neighboring countries in West and Central Africa. We run through our short diaspora litany together: Beatings. Demanding fathers. Mothers more than their match.

What it is to be loved by such people: "You know they love you. ... But it is not all love like, 'Come here and give me a hug.' That's not happening. I never got any of that."

The need to defend them: "The way I was raised is also one of the main reasons why I'm here."

The need to renounce them, too: "The way I was raised is not the way I'm raising my kids."

Maybe it's the background we share. Maybe it's because he started therapy in the fall. Maybe it's the six months he has spent in the basketball void -- his fans on the verge of mutiny, his relationship with the 76ers shot through with strife, the late prime of his career interrupted by a lost season at 31 years old, just as he seemed to attain the full flowering of his brilliance -- maybe now he needsto talk.

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

Spoiler

Everyone else is. The Embiid discourse, let's call it; a narrative meant to assign a verdict of blame for why Embiid's transcendent ability has not produced a championship or even a Finals appearance. And there are summary statements bubbling now, too, career obituaries. The Ringer, citing his injuries, recently ranked Embiid -- who was league MVP in 2023 -- as the 84th-best player in the NBA. Bleacher Report has him at 66th all time.

After surgery to repair his meniscus in February 2024, Embiid spent the 2024-25 season either recovering from or playing through pain. He played just 19 games and looked like himself in only a fraction of those. Now, he's in the middle of what he's rightly calling the "most important" offseason of his life, rebuilding his body again, preparing to launch into what he hopes will be, if all goes well, his final chapter as an elite-level player. It's not hysterical to wonder about the end -- we might be watching it. And if we are, then what has Joel Embiid been?

He's been misunderstood. He's not blameless in that. He's been dominant, and then hobbled or absent. He's been resented for that.

Even his most painful grief has been thrown in his face. At the start of Embiid's rookie season in 2014, his 13-year-old brother Arthur was hit by a truck and killed. The day Arthur died, Embiid ignored a series of phone calls. When he finally answered, it was terrible news.

Even now, phone calls can send a tremor through him, a quicksilver slice of panic -- someone is dead. In fact, he rarely answers texts or calls. His notifications are turned off.

Those who need to reach him do so through his assistant or his wife. His replies can take months.

"I have a reputation of being not a good texter," Embiid tells me, adding that he probably has 10,000 unread messages.

"You're kidding," I say.

He reaches for his phone, taps the screen and leans forward to show me. More than 9,500 unread texts and 875 missed calls. Some of the messages are years old.

"I just can't do it," he says, sitting back.

I ask who this annoys most in his life.

"Everybody," he says.

EMBIID IS GETTING COMFORTABLE, stretching his legs. I ask him why some people who adore him have jokingly called him an a--hole.

"I like to troll a lot," he says. "I wouldn't say I'm an a--hole."

He thinks on it for a second, then concedes, "At times, I can be an a--hole."

I first met Embiid in Chicago late last year, after he returned from a seven-game absence due to left knee issues. Loose, jovial talk filled the visitors locker room at United Center, an air of celebration. Sixers veteran guard Kyle Lowryordered four trays of wings from Chicago's famous Harold's Chicken.

After a cold start against the Bulls, Embiid looked like himself in an eight-point victory. Lithe and destructive, a one-man revolution of hybrid plays who has layered skill on skill for years. Watch him think his way around the court, moving, as he did that afternoon, between low-post bully to midpost spinning fadeaway artist to metronomic rise-up shooter at the elbows and nail. See the film study, the drills, the painstaking work. This is talent working on itself, shaping and reshaping.

He outscored the Bulls by himself in the second quarter.

His offense was a sideshow compared to what he did to then-Bulls guard Zach LaVine late in the second. LaVine attacked Embiid downhill off a screen, swerving left and wrong-footing Embiid. What happened next happened very slowly and very fast all at once. Embiid whirled, turning his back to LaVine for a moment. Against 99% of the NBA, LaVine wins the duel from this position. But Embiid came out of his twirl between LaVine and the rim. They jumped together, Embiid's momentum carrying him backward, a high hand turning what looked like a LaVine dunk into a contested miss.

No coach in the world would teach that. No drill can prepare you for it. At Embiid's best, there's no one to compare him to. Not Nikola Jokic or Luka Doncic or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who for all his offensive gifts can't turn the interior of the defense into a black hole. Not Giannis Antetokounmpo or Anthony Davis, who for all their versatility can't ascend into a trance of pure jump shooting.

You could feel it in the locker room; if Embiid were healthy enough to play like that, this team could achieve anything. It was early December, and there was still enough time to hope.

Embiid eyed the Harold's Chicken spread, plucked a wing and walked to his locker. After a wait, he fronted the media scrum.

I asked him how he found a rhythm after starting 0-for-7 from the field. Postgame white noise.

"I just got lucky and started making shots," Embiid said.

Refusing to smarten up, I asked, "Does it really feel like luck?"

"Yeah, it is luck."

I stood directly in front of him. His expression was frozen in an affectation of boredom. He held that for a tense second before a smile started to play at the corners of his mouth.

Everyone cracked up.

This is a perquisite Joel Embiid experience, one where he decides how full of it you are by watching as you try to discern how full of it he is.

During his freshman year at Kansas, Embiid would sometimes pretend his English wasn't good enough to understand what people were saying. He started to tell an exoticizing story in those days, that as a boy in Cameroon, he wandered alone into the jungle and killed a lion as a rite of passage.

"People actually believed him," his college coach, Bill Self, recalls. "There was a lot of things that he would do in fun, but I never knew him to be much of a talker as far as expressing true feelings."

The jokes worked as shelters, places to hide himself. Instead of being known, he subsisted on being known as clever.

Watching him in the locker room in Chicago, I imagined him looking at his college teammates, trying not to smirk at their credulity. A reporter asked how hard he worked to get back for this game.

"Trust the process," Embiid said, referencing the Sixers' 2013-16 tanking strategy from which his nickname derives. His smile is gone.

But stony hostility doesn't suit him. He's sensitive, about to display his wounds. "I got to give short answers, because when I give long answers, they try to twist my words," Embiid said, turning to a couple of teammates.

"Good answer! Good answer!" Tyrese Maxeycalled out from his locker.

We stood in the aftermath of a galling media cycle. It started in late October when a Philadelphia Inquirer writer mentioned Embiid's son and his late brother in a column chastising Embiid's lack of professionalism and inability to stay in shape. The column implied there was a gap between Embiid's conduct and his public statements about playing to honor his brother's memory.

"I've done way too much for this city, putting myself at risk," Embiid responded days later. "I've done way too much for this f---ing city to be treated like this."

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

Spoiler

When the columnist showed up in the locker room the next day, the two men came face to face. "The next time you bring up my dead brother and my son again, you are going to see what I'm going to do to you," Embiid said. The altercation ended when Embiid shoved the columnist and Sixers staff stepped in between them. The NBA suspended Embiid three games without pay.

Months later, the column still gnaws at him.

"I don't care if the NBA wants to fine me $1 million, $2 million, $5 million, $10 million, I would still do it," Embiid says. "If he walked up to me just like he did, I would push him away again."

Embiid hasn't stopped blaming himself for leaving his brother in Cameroon to play basketball in 2011. Francois Nyam, one of his agents in 2014, called Embiid the night Arthur died. He says the first thing Embiid managed to say after sobbing was, "That's my fault. I'm a piece of s---."

Embiid's family had planned to be together on draft night in 2014, but after Embiid's first foot surgery, doctors told him not to fly. He remained in Los Angeles at his agent's home while Arthur stayed with family friends on the East Coast before returning to Cameroon. The accident happened nearly four months later. The brothers hadn't seen each other in three years.

"It's never going to change," Embiid says, all but whispering. "I still feel it."

---

WEEKS AFTER the locker room altercation in November, the Sixers held a closed-door meeting to address the team's calamitous 2-11 start.

Details of the meeting leaked the following day. Maxey, whom Embiid considers one of his best friends, confronted Embiid about being late for team events and dragging the morale of the group down.

Embiid told a reporter, "Whoever leaked that is a real piece of s---." He reportedly vowed to find the source.

"I know who leaked it," Embiid tells me during a late-night phone call after the season ends.

"You do?"

"Yeah, but I'm not going to -- the past is the past," Embiid says. "The one thing I'll say is, it's hard being around people that do those sorts of stuff.

"That goes back to the trust thing. Once you cross that -- you can't expect me to be part of a team meeting again. That's just not going to happen."

"The way you're talking, it sounds like this person is still around," I say.

"I don't know," he says.

"Come on, Joel, you know who's on your team right now," I say, laughing.

"Free agency just started," he says. "I don't know what's going on."

"So there's a chance this person may not be around next season," I say.

"No," he says. "There's a chance they're still around."

---

TAKE A SENTIMENTAL journey: A young Joel Embiid watches Kobe Bryant win his fourth championship in 2009 and falls in love with basketball. He starts playing seriously at 16. In July 2011, he is discovered at a camp in Yaoundé, Cameroon's capital and Embiid's hometown. He leaves his family behind and moves to the U.S. as a raw but gifted prospect two months later. He improves at a miraculous rate, is recruited by several elite programs and ends up at Kansas after witnessing Late Night in the Phog in Lawrence. He is the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NBA draft. You know the rest.

It's a fairy tale, one that obscures a period of profound rupture for Embiid. He was first shepherded by then-NBA player and fellow Cameroonian Luc Mbah a Moute and Nyam to Montverde Academy, a prep school west of Orlando, Florida. After struggling for playing time his first year, Embiid was relocated again, this time to The Rock School in Gainesville, Florida.

With the help of his new coach at The Rock, Embiid moved in with a host family. Marcy Hansen's first thought when she saw 18-year-old Joel Embiid was that there was no way he would be able to sleep on her daughter's recently vacated twin mattress.

He was nearing 7 feet tall. His accent was thick, his English halting. If someone asked him what city he lived in, the best he could come up with was "Florida." Hansen noticed quickly that he was struggling. He would lie to his parents on the phone, insisting he was well, then sink into a morose silence.

There has always been something lonely in Embiid, something he can't quite explain. One of his most vivid childhood memories is of visiting France on a family vacation around the age of 12. But while everyone left to go sightseeing, Joel stubbornly holed up in his aunt's apartment, playing video games. His parents left him out of subsequent family trips to France, bringing just his two siblings.

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

Spoiler

From then, it never really changed," he says.

Hansen was desperate to cheer him up and connect with him. She made him chocolate chip cookies and brought him Chinese takeout for lunch. She hoped her son would bond with him over basketball, but Joel was too closed off.

"It felt weird for me," Embiid remembers. "I got there, one of the first things that I saw was guns."

Hansen's husband, Ric, is a veteran and an avid hunter. Embiid's father, Thomas, was an officer in Cameroon's military, but Embiid didn't know people lived with so many guns in their homes.

"I don't think anybody understands my point of view," Embiid tells me. "Why I was reserved and why I liked to be in my room, why I tried to lock the door... I was kind of scared."

Basketball was little consolation. Embiid hardly bonded with teammates; they noticed the distance and left him alone. He told his coach he had preferred the dorms at Montverde, where he roomed with another international student who also spoke very little English.

"He was thrown into a totally different world and then thrown into another world, within a year," Hansen says. "He probably didn't let us in as much as I would have liked."

Eventually, Ric Hansen approached Embiid's coach, and they arranged for Joel to move in with one of the team's assistant coaches.

Memories of Embiid from this period are often bright and vivid and totally superficial: He was in the room, he was friendly, tall, he ate something sweet, he didn't seem to be paying attention until he would supply a sharp quip, surprising people. He is beloved, missed, cheered from afar.

Nothing was above Embiid's suspicion, not even evaluations of his talent. "He didn't know that he was going to be a D-I player, which is kind of crazy to me," says Freddy Bitondo, a friend and former Rock teammate. "He would tell me stuff, like, 'If basketball don't work, I'll just go to a school for four years and find a job.' And I'm looking at him, like, 'Yo, you're killing us in practice; what are you talking about, bro?'"

When he arrived at Kansas, Embiid was convinced he would redshirt as a freshman and spend five years in school. "You're going to be the best guy I've ever had," Self told Embiid.

By the end of his freshman season in spring 2014, Embiid was a projected No. 1 pick. He went to Self and confessed he didn't feel ready. He didn't know how to eat healthy. He didn't even know how to drive.

"I actually decided to stay," he says. "In my head, I was like, 'I don't deserve this. I only averaged 11 points.' I didn't know much about basketball. I didn't understand how the whole system worked."

But those closest to him -- his father, Mbah a Moute and Nyam -- told Embiid it was time to go. He packed his bags and moved to his agent's mansion in Los Angeles.

While there, recovering after his first navicular bone surgery, Embiid remembers returning late one night and realizing he didn't know the security code to get back inside. So, he did what any teenager might do: He jumped the fence, his surgically repaired right foot still in a cast, and set off the intruder alarm.

He was, at the time, less than three years removed from the JV team at Montverde, where he once caught an outlet pass alone under the basket, only to leap cluelessly in the air, past the backboard and out of bounds. His life was being accelerated at a speed he could not comprehend, propelled by a story about himself he did not believe, supplied by people he did not trust.

"I never knew how good I was," Embiid says. "What are these people talking about? What am I going to do about it? Am I going to believe what they say?"

THE MOMENT Adam Silver announced Embiid as the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NBA draft, ESPN's feed cut to Embiid staring blankly into the camera.

"He seems confused," Bill Simmons, an ESPN columnist at the time, said on the broadcast. "Get Joel some coffee."

Embiid later explained that the tape was delayed, and the broadcast eventually played his actual reaction -- he pumped his fists and smiled. But in some ways, he has never fully caught up to that delay.

Embiid and the 76ers waited two years for his foot to heal. Reports at the time claimed that he hadn't been taking his rehab and nutrition seriously. His third year in the league (but first on the court) was cut short by a meniscus tear in the same left knee that troubles him now. A couple of weeks after the 76ers shut him down that season, he jumped on stage at a Meek Mill show, ripped off his shirt and danced to the sound of cheers. The 76ers president of basketball operations at the time, Bryan Colangelo, scolded Embiid publicly. Embiid had "crossed a line, perception-wise," Colangelo said.

The following season, 2017-18, he was recorded eating a burger courtside while having his foot rubbed by a trainer before a game. An early iteration of the Embiid discourse emerged: Joel's lazy. He doesn't care.

---

"I STILL SEE a lot of people bring it up, talking about the silly stuff I used to do as a kid, just my second, my third year in the league," he says. "I started playing basketball at 16. You would not be in this position by being lazy.

"Starting so much later than everybody else, having to learn the game at the rapid rate that I did, coming to a new country, not knowing the language, learning a different culture, adjusting, being by yourself, that would not happen if you weren't focused."

I ask him in what ways he is responsible for being misunderstood.

"Go through all the media narratives," Embiid says. "I haven't been paying attention. So, I don't know what's happened."

He's kidding, of course. I'm expecting him to smile any second now.

But he doesn't. Instead, he repeats himself, his voice more urgent: "Go through the narratives."

Joel makes excuses.

"It's not making excuses. When you're hurt every year and everybody knows it, it's the truth," he says. "Now, do you believe, if he was 100 percent, does he have what it takes to have a chance at winning? I think a lot of people believe that because I've shown it in the regular season when I was healthy."

Now, he's the one leaning forward.

"What if I did this and I was like, 'You know what? I'm just going to chill all season and coast and average 25? Or 20.' And in the playoffs, I go average 30. Would that make me look great? Probably. If I went from averaging 23 to 30 -- a playoff riser. Oh, my God. Joel Jordan. Whatever.

"The Brooklyn series two years ago is a perfect example. Double me everywhere. Half court, as soon as I had the ball, that coach was like, 'Go get it.' And guess what? I was fine with it because we kicked the ball out, we made shots, and we won. But guess what it did? It lowered the stats.

"So, if that's the narrative that's out there, I'm OK with that because I know what I'm going through and I know what's going on. And no one is in my body to understand what I'm going through."

"What other narratives?" he asks.

Joel cares too much about individual awards.

"If you are in a position to win an MVP, I don't care who you are, you're going after it because I never believed I would be in this position, first of all. Second of all, when I got in the league, I thought, 'Yeah, maybe I'll have a chance to be a great defensive player.' I never thought I was going to be this good offensively."

His thoughts drift back to the playoffs, irritated: "You're basically saying that he's playing harder in the regular season than he's playing in the playoffs, which doesn't make sense because if you look at the minutes, the minutes rise. And you're playing harder. And you do more on both ends of the floor."

He takes a detour into his postseason plus/minus numbers, which measure up with the greats of the game, then chides himself for sounding like his trainer and confidant, Drew Hanlen, who 13 minutes into a phone call sent me a link to Embiid's playoff stats.

"You want one more?" I ask.

"Yeah, I want it," he says.

Joel is talented but doesn't have the extra intangible stuff it takes to lead.

"No one is a winner until they've done it. I'm fine with that narrative because I haven't done it. Charles Barkley, great player, right? But he never won. [Allen Iverson] never won. ... But that doesn't mean they weren't great. They were amazing.

"Everybody leads in his own way. I lead on the court," Embiid continues. "Over the years, you also grow, and you learn a lot. If you ask my teammates now, they'll tell you a way different story than my teammates a couple years ago, because years ago, I was nowhere to be found."

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

Spoiler

Why?" I ask.

"I don't know," he says, briefly leaving the battle against his critics to look inward. "I think it goes back to how I was raised. I don't want to say, lonely but I came to the States, I was alone. I always taught myself to not trust anybody."

BY THE SUMMER of 2014, the 76ers were a year into then-GM Sam Hinkie's "Process." At that point, all Hinkie had produced was an injured big man (Nerlens Noel) and a flawed, soon-to-be-traded Rookie of the Year (Michael Carter-Williams) who couldn't shoot.

Embiid arrived in Philadelphia that fall and had already been declared out for the entire 2014-15 season after surgery on the navicular bone of his right foot. He was 20 years old, cast as a redeemer, and a cloud of uncertainty hung over him and the team.

Deflecting the pressure, he instead played the part of the cutup. He loved social media banter, fronting a one-sided Twitter romance with Rihanna and taking a ride with Vice Sports where he sarcastically played up stories that he drank Shirley Temples by the pitcher.

His former coaches in Florida and Kansas barely recognized him. "I didn't know that he had the ability, or wanted to have the ability, to have all eyes on him," Self says. "In my mind, I'm thinking, 'Jo, what are you doing? Would you just keep your mouth shut? Stay off of social media.'"

Behind the scenes, Embiid was in crisis. He was crushed under the grief of his brother's death, living alone at the Ritz-Carlton in downtown Philadelphia, as if he didn't expect to be around for long. He played video games, ate poorly and hardly slept. His foot wasn't healing. He couldn't play basketball. Rumors spread that his weight rose to nearly 300 pounds. He contemplated quitting.

"He was hanging on by a thread," one friend says.

His relationship with the 76ers unraveled. Embiid believed something was wrong with his injury, but the team brushed it off as laziness, several sources told me. Frustrated, he quit showing up to rehab and training and stopped communicating with the team.

"I had to start being an a--hole," Embiid says. "Whatever they asked me to do, I was, like, 'I'm not doing it.'"

The 76ers, unsure what to do, responded by repeatedly fining him. Embiid tells me he stopped keeping track of how much he was fined that year after the amount reached $300,000. "It's worth it," Embiid remembers thinking. "They're not listening to me, and I'm not going to keep putting my body at risk."

Hinkie, meanwhile, raced to modernize the 76ers' health and performance operation with Embiid in mind. At the start of Embiid's tenure with the 76ers, his rehab had been overseen by an intern.

Hinkie hired David Martin, who had been working at the Australian Institute of Sport for 21 years. For the next year, Martin fielded monthly email questions -- the most rigorous professional test of his career. One question stood out: How would you build a team and treatment plan for a 7-footer with a navicular bone injury?

In one of their first meetings, Hinkie drew a square and then another square inside that one that took up about 90% of the first one's area. The first square was the totality of Martin's time. The second was time spent getting Embiid healthy.

Hinkie emphasized that Embiid's combination of size, skill and talent was extremely rare. Martin had worked with special forces units and a Tour de France champion, but as he listened to Hinkie, Martin thought he had found the culmination of his career.

In June 2015, Hinkie and Martin flew to L.A. to meet with Embiid and Dr. Richard Ferkel, who had operated on Embiid's foot a year before. The news was bad. Embiid's foot had not healed. Embiid sat quietly. Martin was the stranger in the room. He felt Embiid watching him.

"He has a real piercing gaze," Martin says. "You can just see him looking at you in a way. Like, 'Don't feed me any B.S.'"

Embiid remembers feeling disappointed but also vindicated. He was right, and his critics within the organization were wrong. Something had been wrong with his foot. He wasn't imagining pain or making excuses. This was a difficult lesson to unlearn; it is easy to become a prisoner of one's own victories.

A nebulous and contradictory they began to form in Embiid's mind: the coaches, front office executives and medical staff who had "cast him out," as one friend puts it. They wanted to save their jobs, he thought. They wanted him to play hurt -- to prove themselves right for drafting him, to prove themselves right for not wanting to draft him, to sell tickets, to show that he didn't sell tickets. They would be just as happy if his career lasted 18 months or 18 years.

Loyalty became overwhelmingly important to him, and his search for it, his willingness to test it in others, became a way he forged a path within the organization. He remained in a protective bubble, amassing and shedding adherents.

Martin, eager to prove he could be trusted not to abandon the young star, often stayed in Philadelphia with Embiid instead of traveling with the team. One day, he noticed a mess of $20 bills on a table in Embiid's apartment. Martin suggested Embiid put the money away; traffic through Embiid's apartment was frequent -- nutritionists, trainers, housekeeping staff.

No, Embiid said, if anyone took anything, he would know.

"Are you planting this?" Martin asked. "Are you trying to see if anyone will steal from you?"

Embiid didn't say anything.

"Maybe you're checking me out," Martin said. "Maybe you want to know if I would take your money."

They both laughed.

"I don't necessarily do it to people," Embiid tells me. "I'm just going to leave it, and if something is missing, I'm going to know exactly who took it.

"Because that's happened; I've had money or other things that have gone missing," he says.

"When it did happen, I didn't need to confront anybody. That was just, like, 'OK, all right. I got what I needed.' Now, I know not to talk to these people and never trust them."

 

[Anerdyblackguy]

Spoiler

AFTER EMBIID'S SECOND surgery in the summer of 2015, Martin assembled a small, protective core of advocates.

Kim Caspare, an experienced physical therapist, quickly became a key member of the group. In what others mistook for laziness in Embiid, she saw fear -- this was a young man who didn't trust his body, the advice he was getting or the intentions of those giving it. Embiid needed "a family around him," Caspare remembers thinking. "'I've got to just take care of this guy, because this guy is hurting.'"

Caspare began as a consultant but became such a steadying force for Embiid that the Sixers hired her full time in 2019 as a physical therapist. Her initial stint was supposed to last four weeks, but she went on to work with Embiid for nine years.

By the time Embiid met Caspare, his reputation for flaking was well-established. But Caspare says that was never a problem between them. "Never once did Joel not show up when we said we were going to," she says. "But I've seen over [nine] years that he didn't show up for many people."

Embiid did not bend to the traditional command structure of NBA teams. "It's the NBA. People are wrong and strong all the time," Martin says. "They say it loud and say it with authority and expect people to listen to them -- and Joel's not easily manipulated."

Embiid's reputation within the organization was toxic. Everyone was talking: training staff, coaches, massage therapists, reporters, even interns whose main activity was snagging rebounds.

"People whisper in hallways," Martin says.

Embiid was an enigmatic giant, his face shrouded in a hoodie, shuffling slowly and wordlessly, appearing and disappearing, it seemed, on his whim. "He just wouldn't talk to anybody on the team," one person familiar with the situation says. "Literally completely silent."

Things got so bad that Martin drew up a confidential survey for members of the performance department. They were asked to answer multiple-choice questions about several players, including Embiid: Do you think this guy will ever be an MVP? An All-Star? A starter on a championship team? A rotation player? Do you think he'll end up in Europe?

The results were dismaying. "Nobody believed in Joel," Martin tells me. "They just weren't into him." Martin was convinced Embiid would never be able to heal in an environment that was so hostile. He decided to go to Hinkie and owner Josh Harris and ask to take Embiid out of the country, to Aspetar, an orthopedic and sports medicine hospital in Doha, Qatar. After some resistance, the team relented.

Desperate to make the trip count, Martin scheduled a series of appointments with experts. Embiid often missed those meetings. When Martin asked him what was wrong, Embiid explained that he wanted to stay on an NBA schedule. Games are played in the evening; players go to bed late and wake up late. That made sense to Martin -- one of the goals of the visit was to improve Embiid's sleep. When he switched the consultations to the afternoon, Embiid's absences and tardiness stopped. Embiid liked Aspetar so much that the team sent him twice, once in February 2016 and again for a two-week stint at the end of March that year.

A pattern had emerged. Those loyal to Embiid and invested in his future became an organization within the 76ers organization. Embiid's allies saw him as wounded and gifted and alone and in need of reinforcing. Martin, trying to understand how to work with Embiid and explain his behavior, started reading in-depth about working with gifted children. They flattered his proclivities (he did not communicate, so they became his go-betweens, covering for his tardiness) to get the most they could out of him, if not always the best.

"I probably should've just been like, 'Get your ass up off the table and get on the floor,'" Caspare says. "But I didn't do that because he would've maybe gotten off the table and walked into the locker room and done nothing. So I couldn't risk that."

I asked Martin if he feels now that he might have coddled Embiid during this critical early period of his career.

"Joel is really unique," Martin says. "When you sit with him for a bit, it feels like you don't need to play by all the rules. There's a lot of weird rules in the NBA, and there's a lot of things that are culturally expected in the NBA, and they're really designed to make owners feel comfortable, and general managers feel powerful, and coaches feel intelligent, and support staff feel respected."

"I don't know if I'm being perceptive," Martin continues. "Or if I'm creating an elaborate justification for him."

Years later, it's difficult for those who surrounded and supported Embiid to parse between damaging him with indulgence and saving his career.

"If you really went back to the past, and you were there in those moments, you would know him being in the league, and becoming an MVP is a miracle," one member of Embiid's circle says. "There are top coaches, there are top league executives who did not believe he would step foot on the court again."

 

[The God Poster]

Anybody calling guys like Joel or Kawhi soft were idiots to begin with.

 

[GilSho]

Article is so good that even his biggest haters are showing him some empathy and grace. Guy is a warrior that was let down by an incompetent franchise.

 

[duckbutta]

Anybody calling guys like Joel or Kawhi soft were idiots to begin with.

 

[jwinfield]

 

[Sonic Boom of the South]

fukk that crybaby SOFT ass brittle bone bytch ass mafukka.

 

[mastermind]

So many sports organizations are poorly ran in that way. it’s incredible how cheap these owners are.

 

[Tony D'Amato]

I would never call him soft. Ppl that big are just not meant to do whats asked of him. Shaq and Wilt were anomalies.

 

[concise]

Anybody calling guys like Joel or Kawhi soft were idiots to begin with.

I'd never call Kawhi soft.

 

[Big Boss]