It has taken months to arrive at this point. Months of anticipation, waiting for Joel Embiid to play, for him not to play, and for him to finally decide what, if anything, he wished to convey about a season that once brimmed with potential.
We are in his piano room. He reclines on a couch that, despite its apparent spaciousness, seems to shrink as his long frame settles onto it. He`s dressed in a coordinated set—pinstriped shorts and a camp collar shirt. His son, Arthur, peeks playfully around corners from the hallway, curious about our activities. Upstairs, his wife, Anne de Paula, is making preparations for her birthday celebration that evening. Decorations are being arranged in his dining room. It’s late March, just nine days before the knee surgery that will heavily influence Embiid`s basketball future.
He once enjoyed interviews. Before even playing a single NBA game, during the two years he spent sidelined from 2014 to 2015, recovering from right foot surgeries, he was a media darling—a witty storyteller and a candid confessor. However, the past year has changed him. These days, he appears cautious, somewhat distracted by the Phillies game he`s watching on his phone. I find myself wondering if he might politely escort me out. We engage in small talk for a while, and he looks bored.
This is his usual demeanor with new acquaintances—he reveals little, pretending not to observe while he subtly assesses and weighs them. I ask if we can begin the on-record interview. He agrees.
Embiid has ample reasons to call this off. He believes that explaining himself will be twisted into self-defense, which will then be caricatured as complaining. And considering his life—his second child, a daughter, is on the way. His parents are provided for. His family’s financial security is assured for generations. He serves as an inspiration in Cameroon.
We are inside his opulent stone colonial residence, a mansion perched atop a gently sloping hill in the Philadelphia suburbs. The hand towels in at least one of his eleven bathrooms are monogrammed with his initials—what could he possibly 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 states. “As a man, you can’t tell me nothing.”
We are only a few feet apart, and I find myself leaning forward in my chair to hear him. His voice is so quiet it seems to accentuate his imposing physical presence. This is the introverted, solitary Joel Embiid, known intimately by very few.
His friends are fiercely protective, bordering on paranoid. They perceive Embiid as he sees himself—as someone beleaguered from all sides. In essence, they love him on his own terms.
“When you have his trust, it’s kind of intoxicating,” one friend remarks. “It’s like you just penetrated this force field that nobody gets to be in.”
So, I immediately ask him, “Who do you trust?”
“Hmm,” Embiid responds, seconds of silence passing. “I mean, uhh.” He looks at me, his attention sharpening as if asking: What do you presume to know?
“I’ve never been the one to have a lot of friends,” he finally says. “And even then, with the ones that I consider close, I never try to go deep into anything.”
“Why?” I inquire.
“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 both hail from the same region of the world, neighboring countries in West and Central Africa. We quickly go through our shared diaspora experience: Beatings. Demanding fathers. Mothers who were more than their match.
What it feels like 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 necessity to defend them: “The way I was raised is also one of the main reasons why I’m here.” The necessity to break from them, too: “The way I was raised is not the way I’m raising my kids.”
Perhaps it`s our shared background. Perhaps it`s because he began therapy last fall. Perhaps it`s the six months he spent in a basketball vacuum—his fans nearing mutiny, his relationship with the 76ers fraught with tension, the peak of his career interrupted by a lost season at 31 years old, just as he seemed to achieve the full bloom of his brilliance—maybe now he needs to talk.
Everyone else is talking. The Embiid discourse, as it`s called, is a narrative aimed at assigning blame for why Embiid’s extraordinary talent has not led to a championship or even a Finals appearance. And now, summary statements are emerging, career obituaries. The Ringer, citing his injuries, recently ranked Embiid—the league MVP in 2023—as the 84th-best player in the NBA. Bleacher Report places him at 66th all-time.
Following surgery to repair his meniscus in February 2024, Embiid spent the 2024-25 season either recovering from or playing through pain. He appeared in just 19 games and only looked like his true self in a fraction of those. Now, he`s in the midst of what he rightly calls the “most important” offseason of his life, once again rebuilding his body, preparing to embark on what he hopes will be, if all goes well, his final chapter as an elite-level player. It`s not an exaggeration to ponder the end—we might be witnessing it. And if we are, what legacy has Joel Embiid left?
He has been misunderstood, and he is not entirely blameless in that. He has been dominant, then sidelined or absent, and resented for it.
Even his most profound grief has been used against him. At the start of Embiid’s rookie season in 2014, his 13-year-old brother, Arthur, was struck and killed by a truck. The day Arthur died, Embiid ignored a series of phone calls. When he finally answered, it was the devastating news. Even now, phone calls can send a tremor through him, a swift, piercing wave of panic—someone is dead. In fact, he rarely responds to 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 messages are years old.
“I just can’t do it,” he says, leaning back.
I ask who this annoys most in his life.
“Everybody,” he replies.
Embiid’s Public Persona and Private Self
Embiid is growing more comfortable, stretching his legs. I ask him why some people who adore him have playfully called him an “a–hole.”
“I like to troll a lot,” he says. “I wouldn’t say I’m an a–hole.” He pauses for a moment, then concedes, “At times, I can be an a–hole.”
I first met Embiid in Chicago late last year, after his return from a seven-game absence due to left knee issues. Loose, jovial conversation filled the visitors` locker room at United Center, an atmosphere of celebration. Sixers veteran guard Kyle Lowry ordered four trays of wings from Chicago’s famous Harold’s Chicken.
After a sluggish start against the Bulls, Embiid regained his form in an eight-point victory. Lithe and devastating, he was a one-man hybrid revolution, layering skill upon skill over the years. Watching him navigate the court, moving as he did that afternoon, from a low-post powerhouse to a mid-post spinning fadeaway artist, to a consistent rise-up shooter from the elbows and nail. You could see the film study, the drills, the meticulous effort. This is talent refining itself, constantly shaping and reshaping.
He outscored the Bulls by himself in the second quarter.
His offense was secondary to what he did to then-Bulls guard Zach LaVine late in the second quarter. LaVine attacked Embiid downhill off a screen, swerving left and wrong-footing Embiid. What transpired next happened both incredibly slowly and incredibly fast. Embiid whirled, turning his back to LaVine for a moment. Against 99% of the NBA, LaVine would win this duel from that position. But Embiid emerged from his spin between LaVine and the rim. They jumped simultaneously, Embiid’s momentum carrying him backward, a high hand turning what appeared to be 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 comparable. Not Nikola Jokic or Luka Doncic or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who, despite all their offensive gifts, cannot transform the interior defense into a black hole. Not Giannis Antetokounmpo or Anthony Davis, who, despite all their versatility, cannot enter a trance of pure jump shooting.
You could sense it in the locker room; if Embiid could play like that consistently, healthy, this team could achieve anything. It was early December, and there was still enough time for hope.
Embiid eyed the Harold’s Chicken spread, picked up a wing, and walked to his locker. After a brief wait, he faced the media scrum. I asked him how he found his rhythm after starting 0-for-7 from the field. It was typical postgame banter.
“I just got lucky and started making shots,” Embiid said.
Refusing to back down, I asked, “Does it really feel like luck?”
“Yeah, it is luck.”
I stood directly in front of him. His expression was fixed in an affectation of boredom. He held that pose for a tense second before a smile began to play at the corners of his mouth. Everyone burst into laughter.
This is a quintessential Joel Embiid experience, one where he assesses how gullible you are by observing your attempts to discern his sincerity.
During his freshman year at Kansas, Embiid would sometimes feign that his English wasn’t sufficient to understand what people were saying. In those days, he began telling an embellished story: that as a boy in Cameroon, he once 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 were 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 served as a shield, a place to conceal himself. Instead of being truly known, he settled for 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 return for this game. “Trust the process,” Embiid said, referencing the Sixers’ 2013-16 tanking strategy from which his nickname derives. His smile was gone.
But stony hostility doesn’t suit him. He is sensitive, about to reveal his vulnerabilities. “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 Maxey called out from his locker.
We stood in the aftermath of a particularly galling media cycle. It began in late October when a Philadelphia Inquirer writer mentioned Embiid’s son and his late brother in a column criticizing Embiid’s perceived lack of professionalism and inability to stay in shape. The column implied a discrepancy 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.” When the columnist appeared 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 intervened. The NBA suspended Embiid three games without pay.
Months later, the column still bothers 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 states. “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 pursue 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 advised 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 occurred nearly four months later. The brothers hadn’t seen each other in three years. “It’s never going to change,” Embiid says, almost whispering. “I still feel it.”
Team Dynamics and Trust Issues
Weeks after the locker room altercation in November, the Sixers held a private meeting to address the team’s disastrous 2-11 start. Details of the meeting leaked the following day. Maxey, whom Embiid considers one of his closest friends, confronted Embiid about being late for team events and negatively impacting team morale.
Embiid told a reporter, “Whoever leaked that is a real piece of s—.” He reportedly vowed to identify the source. “I know who leaked it,” Embiid tells me during a late-night phone call after the season concludes. “You do?” I ask. “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 remark. “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 suggest. “No,” he says. “There’s a chance they’re still around.”
A Journey of Profound Rupture
Consider a nostalgic journey: A young Joel Embiid watches Kobe Bryant win his fourth championship in 2009 and falls deeply in love with basketball. He begins 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 relocates to the U.S. as a raw but gifted prospect two months later. He improves at an astonishing rate, is recruited by several elite programs, and ultimately chooses Kansas after experiencing Late Night in the Phog in Lawrence. He is the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NBA draft. The rest, as they say, is history.
It sounds like a fairy tale, but it conceals a period of profound upheaval for Embiid. He was first guided 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 in his first year, Embiid was relocated again, this time to The Rock School in Gainesville, Florida.
With the assistance of his new coach at The Rock, Embiid moved in with a host family. Marcy Hansen’s initial thought upon seeing 18-year-old Joel Embiid was that he would never be able to sleep on her daughter’s recently vacated twin mattress. He was nearing 7 feet tall. His accent was thick, and his English halting. If someone asked him what city he lived in, the best he could manage was “Florida.” Hansen quickly noticed he was struggling. He would lie to his parents on the phone, insisting he was well, then sink into a melancholic silence.
There has always been a solitary quality in Embiid, something he struggles to articulate. One of his most vivid childhood memories is visiting France on a family vacation around the age of 12. But while everyone else left to sightsee, Joel stubbornly stayed holed up in his aunt’s apartment, playing video games. His parents subsequently left him out of future family trips to France, bringing only his two siblings. “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 remained too withdrawn. “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 had no idea 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 offered little comfort. Embiid hardly bonded with teammates; they noticed his 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 explains. “He probably didn’t let us in as much as I would have liked.” Ultimately, 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, vivid, yet entirely superficial: He was present, he was friendly, tall, he ate something sweet, he seemed inattentive until he would deliver a sharp quip, surprising everyone. He is beloved, missed, cheered from afar. Nothing escaped 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 into the air, past the backboard, and out of bounds. His life was accelerating at a speed he could not comprehend, propelled by a narrative 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 Early Years with the Sixers: Misunderstanding and Resistance
The moment Adam Silver announced Embiid as the No. 3 pick in the 2014 NBA draft, the broadcast cut to Embiid staring blankly into the camera. “He seems confused,” Bill Simmons, an ESPN columnist at the time, remarked 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 sidelined him 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, publicly admonished Embiid. Embiid had “crossed a line, perception-wise,” Colangelo stated.
The following season, 2017-18, he was recorded eating a burger courtside while having his foot massaged by a trainer before a game. An early iteration of the Embiid discourse emerged: Joel’s lazy. He doesn’t care.
Addressing the Narratives
“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.”
“Why?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says, briefly abandoning his battle against critics to introspect. “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.”
Battling the Organization and Finding Loyalty
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, faking 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 deteriorated. Embiid believed something was wrong with his injury, but the team dismissed it as laziness, several sources told me. Frustrated, he stopped showing up to rehab and training and ceased 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 how to proceed, 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, rushed to modernize the 76ers’ health and performance operations 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 represented 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 prior. 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, accumulating 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.”
A System Within a System: Building Trust and Support
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. What others mistook for laziness in Embiid, she perceived as fear—this was a young man who didn’t trust his body, the advice he was receiving, or the intentions of those providing 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 conform 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 silently, appearing and disappearing, it seemed, at his whim. “He just wouldn’t talk to anybody on the team,” one person familiar with the situation says. “Literally completely silent.”
Things became so dire that Martin created 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 disheartening. “Nobody believed in Joel,” Martin tells me. “They just weren’t into him.” Martin was convinced Embiid would never be able to heal in such a hostile environment. He decided to approach Hinkie and owner Josh Harris and request to take Embiid out of the country, to Aspetar, an orthopedic and sports medicine hospital in Doha, Qatar. After some initial resistance, the team agreed.
Desperate to make the trip worthwhile, 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 maintain 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 ceased. Embiid liked Aspetar so much that the team sent him twice, once in February 2016 and again for a two-week period at the end of March that year.
A pattern had emerged. Those loyal to Embiid and invested in his future formed an organization within the 76ers organization. Embiid’s allies saw him as wounded, gifted, and isolated, in need of reinforcement. Martin, attempting to understand how to work with Embiid and explain his behavior, began reading extensively about working with gifted children. They indulged his inclinations (he didn’t communicate, so they became his intermediaries, 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 distinguish between potentially harming 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 inner circle says. “There are top coaches, there are top league executives who did not believe he would step foot on the court again.”
The Public Face of Pain and Performance
I met with 76ers head coach Nick Nurse and president of basketball operations Daryl Morey in a sunny conference room at the team’s practice facility in Camden, New Jersey. It was a late morning in early April, and players were trickling in for practice.
Only five games remained in the season. The Sixers would lose four of them, finishing 24-58, their worst record since 2015-16, the year before Embiid’s debut.
Both men had experienced difficulties with Sixers fans and the media throughout the 2024-25 season. At MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March, Morey caused a stir when he stated he used AI modeling to aid in personnel decisions and further angered fans by saying, “Anger is all that drives Sixers fans as far as I can tell.”
For Nurse, it was the aggravation of spending the season as a blend of surgeon general and press secretary, a role he was clearly fed up with. “I’m up there answering medical questions all the time,” Nurse tells me, gesticulating with his hands. “‘Hey, [Embiid’s] getting this thing on Tuesday. We’ll have more information on Wednesday.’ Well, something happens on Tuesday, and this MRI doesn’t happen, and now it’s Wednesday, and they’re like, ‘You said you were going to give us an update today. Why didn’t you?’ Well, the timeline has changed. That’s the timeline I had two days ago, but now it’s changed.
“Don’t be mad at me, I’m just telling you what’s happening.”
The uncertainty surrounding Embiid’s playing status became an ongoing storyline, frequently causing tension among fans, reporters, and the organization. In late November, an unexpected Embiid absence transformed the Wells Fargo Center into a collective game of Clue. Embiid was scheduled to warm up and then decide about playing, but he never did. One reporter claimed he wasn’t even in the arena. Another said they spotted his knee brace in front of his locker. Another said they saw a cellphone on his usual chair but couldn’t confirm whether the phone belonged to Embiid.
“He’s insanely private,” one Sixers staffer told me that night.
But not inscrutable. Nurse and Morey only had to observe. His pregame warmups were like miniature operas. Every missed shot in his routine aggravated him. He missed and looked up at the sky, raising his arms as if to ask, why? He missed and rolled his eyes in disdain. He missed and shook his head in exasperation. He missed and bent over to clutch his sweats at the knee, hands clenched into tight fists.
There was more, a repertoire of Embiid’s gestures and expressions: There’s the head clutch that signifies irritation with himself or a teammate but can also imply, “it’s so stupid and ridiculous how good I am.” There’s the one he does when a shot comes off his fingers incorrectly but still goes in, where he tilts his head and makes that facial expression signaling a mock thought. A slight jut of the lower lip, the “could be worse” face. There’s the one where he shoots his arms out from his hips as if about to flash finger pistols and say, “let me see your hands.” Instead, his fists remain clenched, and he swears at himself, either viciously or rapturously.
He was anticipating things to go wrong, and they did. He somehow tripped and fell on two separate occasions during warmups. First in Chicago, where no one seemed to notice, and then again on Christmas Day against Boston, where the clip went viral.
When he got to his feet and removed the black protective mask he had been wearing (weeks prior, he had sustained the fifth major facial injury of his career, dating back to his Florida AAU team), his face displayed a particularly Embiid-like blend of expressions: He was furious. Over it—truly, deeply sick of everything. He couldn’t believe it, and then, wait, of course he could. He stared at the ground, shaking his head at it as if even the parquet court was intent on betraying him.
He transformed Christmas afternoon into a spectacle of exuberant defiance. He despises Boston, and Boston despises him. Where better to perform? He Eurostepped past Jaylen Brown and Payton Pritchard for an and-1 and performed the DX chop. He sank a 3-pointer just before halftime and swung his arms into an “up yours” gesture that made the crowd shriek with loathing. He stood near center court jawing at fans, placing his hand over his heart, waving goodbye. He made two late free throws to seal the victory and walked backward with a diabolical grin on his face.
His moods descend upon him and become the prevailing atmosphere for an entire game, an entire team, an entire season.
The Zenith and the Injury
“I think people forget he had a real injury at Golden State,” Nurse says. “But leading up to that point, he was playing the best basketball of his life.”
It was some of the finest basketball we have ever witnessed. The Sixers were 26-7 with Embiid in the lineup before he injured his left knee at Golden State in January 2024. He was averaging 35.3 points in 34 minutes, surpassing Wilt Chamberlain’s 1961-62 season and on track to become only the second player in history to score more than a point per minute. He scored at least 30 points in 22 consecutive games, the fifth-longest 30-point streak in NBA history. He recorded 16 straight games with at least 30 points and 10 rebounds, tying Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for the second-longest such streak.
In December 2023, the Sixers went 8-1 with Embiid on the floor. He averaged 40.2 points and 12.6 rebounds with an astounding 60.6% shooting rate. There were also emphatic performances. A 51-point, 12-rebound effort in a late December dismantling of the Minnesota Timberwolves. Then, in January, a casual 70-point, 18-rebound explosion against the Spurs, achieved in a classic style—he made only one of his two 3-pointers.
Embiid missed the next two months after the Golden State game, recovering from meniscus surgery on his left knee. He returned late in the season, clearly hampered, to aid a playoff push. The Sixers won their final eight games and qualified for the play-in tournament, where they defeated the Miami Heat and advanced to a first-round series against the New York Knicks.
Embiid appeared dominant early in Game 1, starting 4-of-5. In the second quarter, he pump-faked, then stepped through and tossed the ball off the backboard, leaping past Mitchell Robinson to dunk the ball over OG Anunoby. It was an incredible, audacious play, an all-time playoff highlight until he landed, his left knee wobbled, and he collapsed to the floor. As he lay on his back, an overhead camera showed him with his hands clasped on top of his head, the left side of his face frozen. He made an improbable return in the second half of Game 1, though the 76ers lost. And after a controversial loss in the final seconds of Game 2, Embiid conducted his postgame interview at his locker with his head bowed and his hand over his brow, attempting to conceal his facial paralysis.
He was defiant, bristling as one reporter asked him a question in French. “I’m not talking in French,” Embiid said, cutting him off.