Joel Embiid checks in at No. 41 on The Athletic’s ‘The Basketball 100’: ‘Best player we ever coach’

“The Basketball 100” is the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time from The Athletic’s team of award-winning writers and analysts, including veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger. This excerpt is reprinted from the book, which also features a foreword by Hall of Famer Charles Barkley.

“The Basketball 100” is available Nov. 26. Pre-order it here and read David Aldridge’s introduction.

One day in the spring of 2018, a Philadelphia 76ers assistant named Billy Lange looked at his phone and saw a text message from Joel Embiid: “I want to pray.”

It was a Sunday in April. The NBA playoffs were a week old. It was not the usual afternoon greeting from an NBA star, but then again, there was nothing usual about Joel Embiid.

At that point, he was just 24 years old, a 7-foot behemoth who had feet like a ballet dancer and the droll wit of a stand-up comic. He had grown up an ocean away in Cameroon, the well-to-do son of a military colonel, and he had not played the sport of basketball until he was a teenager. When he considered his life story, he sometimes believed it to be something out of a movie, a surreal Hollywood dream.

But here he was, in the middle of the NBA playoffs, wearing a clunky mask to protect a broken orbital bone near his left eye. Lange sensed he was nervous. Maybe even scared. The day before, the No. 3–seeded Sixers had defeated the Heat in Miami to take a 3–1 series lead. But Embiid had scored just 14 points. Something seemed off.

Lange tapped out a reply. Did he want to pray together?

“No,” Embiid answered. “I want to go to church.”

Lange fired a quick text to Rev. Rob Hagan, a team chaplain at Villanova, who was on his way to Sunday evening mass, which is how Embiid came to sneak in late to St. Kevin Parish in Springfield, Pennsylvania, finding refuge in a pew in the back.

Embiid sat quietly, took communion, then waited around to talk to Hagan. He wanted to ask more about the homily. Villanova had just won its second NCAA championship in three years. Hagan was around the program constantly. Embiid was curious about its culture, about the players and coaches and how they all seemed to play for each other.

“We talked about that, how if you live with humility and faith, you’re going to have people that are willing to pass the ball and not take all the shots and not want all the glory and recognize we’re stronger together,” Hagan would say. “He wanted to know about that.”

When the conversation was over, and the church had emptied out, Embiid sent another text message to Lange. He wasn’t ready to go home. He wondered if he could come over to say hello. He wanted to bring Father Hagan too.

The one eternal truth about Joel Hans Embiid is that he does not obey convention. A 7-footer is not supposed to move like that. He’s not supposed to spin into the lane or step back from 24 feet. He’s not supposed to be so devilishly funny, an outsize personality made for 280 characters.

Embiid was not supposed to grow into one of the best players of his generation, an NBA MVP who averaged a career-high 33.1 points per game in 2022–23—the first center in 47 years to claim back-to-back scoring titles. He was not supposed to become shorthand for an entire era of Philly basketball: the Process.

He weathered the uncertainty of an ailing foot early in his career, pulled the Sixers from the mire of perpetual tanking, and helped return winning to Philly. And he did it all while living out a backstory matched by few all-time greats in NBA history.

Born in Yaoundé, the capital city of Cameroon, Embiid grew up in one of the city’s upper-middle-class enclaves, as far away from the NBA as one could conceive. His father, Thomas, was a colonel in the army and a former handball player. His mother, Christine, was a stickler for academics. His family was comfortable enough to employ a maid.

One of three siblings, Embiid, who grew to 6-feet-7, played volleyball and soccer—at least, he was allowed to do so after finishing his schoolwork. But it wasn’t until he caught a glimpse of Kobe Bryant competing in the NBA Finals that he began to harbor fantasies of basketball glory—or even understand that the very thing existed.

The detailed facts of what happened next have flattened over the years, turning an improbable origin story into a neat and tidy narrative, but the journey began when Embiid’s uncle reached out to an international scout with Cameroonian roots, looking for advice. The contact led to an opportunity with a local team, which led to camps, which led to an invite to a Basketball Without Borders event in South Africa, which led to a roster spot at Montverde Academy, a prestigious prep program in Florida. Montverde also was the alma mater of Luc Mbah a Moute, another Cameroonian, who had played at UCLA before embarking on an NBA career. Embiid left home and enrolled for the 2011–12 school year.

Thousands of miles from home, he spent a year competing in practice against Dakari Johnson, a top big-man prospect who would sign with Kentucky. But with a crowded roster at Montverde, he transferred to the Rock School, a private high school in Gainesville, Florida, for his senior year.

Embiid played little as a junior, but the secret was already starting to get out. One day in 2012, Kansas assistant coach Norm Roberts dragged head coach Bill Self down to Florida to watch practice at the Rock. Flanked by a cadre of college coaches, Roberts watched as Embiid absorbed a beating from two teammates. Embiid was raw, and his body was still filling out, but you could see the potential and Roberts was curious as to what Self thought.

“Wait a minute,” Self whispered, letting some other coaches drift out of earshot.

“Norm,” Self said, “he’s going to be the best player we ever coach in our lifetime.”

When Embiid arrived at Kansas in the summer of 2013, he roomed with a top-10 recruit from Boston named Wayne Selden. One day, Evan Manning, a Kansas walk-on, was strolling by the room and found Embiid on his bed, his face buried in a screen. Curious as to what was so enthralling, Manning looked closer.

“Look at this,” Embiid said.

He was watching old highlights of Hakeem Olajuwon, poring over the details, memorizing the movements. The obsession had started back in Cameroon, when Embiid was just learning the game. A coach handed him a tape. Embiid started his nightly homework. Olajuwon, the Hall of Fame center from Nigeria, became a lodestar.

The coaches at Kansas believed that Embiid would be a two-year project. It would take him one year to figure it out, one year to break out, then he’d leave Kansas and become a lottery pick. Self was convinced. Embiid wasn’t so sure. He was overwhelmed in practice; he struggled to finish conditioning drills. He had never been coached so hard. One time, during the fall of his freshman year, he found himself standing with Manning and walk-on Tyler Self.

“He told us, ‘Yeah, I probably plan on being here about five years. I’ll probably need to redshirt and I’ll play through my senior year,’” Manning said. “We couldn’t tell if he was joking.”

The one thing nobody knew was how fast Embiid would learn.

“He was an absolute sponge,” Roberts said.

Embiid had nimble feet, a feathery touch, and a mean streak. But it was the way he collected skills that amazed teammates. When Embiid was fouling too much early in the season, Roberts pulled out film of former Kansas center Jeff Withey, one of the best shot blockers in program history. Embiid watched carefully for a few minutes as Withey protected the rim, then took the video back to his room. The next game, he finished with seven blocks against UTEP.

“I worried about him being able to understand offense and stuff like that,” Roberts said. “S——, by midseason, he was telling my guards where to go. You could show him a play once and he got it.”

As Embiid learned, his confidence swelled. One day he walked into the office of Kansas assistant Jerrance Howard, mimicked an Olajuwon “Dream Shake,” then walked out. When the Jayhawks played New Mexico in Kansas City, Missouri, he pulled it out.

“It was really ridiculous to see how fast he got better,” Manning said.

Embiid had arrived in a recruiting class with Andrew Wiggins, the consensus top player in the class. But just two months into the season, it was apparent to anyone who was watching: not only was Embiid going to spend just one year in Kansas, but also he was the best NBA prospect on campus.

“After practice was over, and NBA guys were there, I’d say, ‘Jo, come on, let’s do post moves,’ ” Self said. “And I would do that one-on-zero with post moves just so they could see his feet.”

Embiid was showing signs of his big personality too. When Kansas beat Oklahoma State at home, he trolled Cowboys guard Marcus Smart on Instagram. When his teammates didn’t quite understand his Cameroonian upbringing, he concocted a fantastical tale about having to kill a lion with a spear—complete with a regular hashtag: #JoJoKilledaLion. (“He’s just coy,” future Sixers teammate J. J. Redick said.) He just kept getting better, which led to the only bitter aspect of his one season in college: it didn’t have an ending. When Embiid suffered a stress fracture in his lower back during conference play, he never played again. The injury caused questions heading into the NBA Draft, which only grew louder when he sustained a stress fracture in his foot in the weeks before draft night. But 76ers general manager Sam Hinkie—the architect of the so-called Process—was ready to pounce.

The Sixers took Embiid with the third pick in the 2014 draft. They just had to wait two years to see the future.

Embiid averaged a league-leading 33.1 points per game during his 2023 MVP season. (Tim Nwachukwu / Getty Images)

In 2016, Embiid started working with skills trainer Drew Hanlen. He had already missed two seasons with a broken foot that would not heal correctly. At the same time, he grieved the loss of his younger brother Arthur, who was struck by a truck back home in Cameroon. He had dealt with stress and doubts and two years of solitude, and at some point after starting with Hanlen, he invited the trainer to come visit his home in Africa.

Embiid showed Hanlen a plot of land near his childhood home, where he had played soccer as a boy, polishing the footwork that would define his game. The field was filled with kids playing soccer, and so Hanlen and Embiid jumped in. Embiid was still getting healthy, but three or four minutes into the game, the ball popped in the air and Embiid went airborne, trying to execute a bicycle kick while tumbling onto his back. It was one of the moments in which Hanlen realized: Embiid was a different cat. Another came when Hanlen was hanging out as Embiid played the FIFA video game.

“He’s just spending money after money after money buying all these different badges,” Hanlen said. “I don’t even know how FIFA works, but he’s buying all these badges so he can get the best team. And I go: ‘Are you gonna ever play?’ And he goes: ‘No, I’m not playing until I have the best team.’”

Embiid made his professional debut during the 2016–17 season and averaged 20.2 points per game, earning NBA All-Rookie honors. He started his first All-Star Game the next season, helping the Sixers back to the postseason for the first time in six years.

Year by year, his production continued to jump. He averaged 27.5 and 13.6 rebounds in 2018–19; he led the league in scoring in 2021–22, tallying 30.6 points per game while shooting 37 percent from 3-point range. His game was a mix of brute power and skillful finesse, an evolutionary big man whose style adapted to the modern era: imagine Olajuwon after the 3-point revolution—or with the ability to access YouTube. (Embiid once joked that he mastered his shooting stroke by watching “regular white people” shoot jumpers.)

In 2022–23, Embiid led the Sixers to 54 victories, their most since 2001. He led the league in scoring again with 33.1 points per game and he collected his first MVP award in the—ahem—process. He still occasionally fired off a great tweet. The season once again ended in the Eastern Conference semifinals, which left the Sixers remaking their roster. Embiid turned 30 years old in 2024, dropped a 70-point, 18-rebound, five-assist game against the Spurs, and with 34.7 points per game, was on his way to another scoring title, before injuries limited him to 39 games. Embiid has more time to chase his first ring. But the body of work is already there to put Embiid among the greats.

Growing up in Cameroon, Embiid never envisioned any of this. But there was something different about the kid from Yaoundé. He picked basketball and started watching Olajuwon. He started collecting skills, building and refining and growing … until his story was a dream unto itself.

Career NBA stats (through 2023-24): G: 433, Pts.: 27.9, Reb.: 11.2, Ast.: 3.6, Win Shares: 63.5, PER: 28.5
Achievements: NBA MVP (’23), Five-time All-NBA, Seven-time NBA All-Star, Olympic gold (‘24)

Excerpted from “The Basketball 100” published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photo: Elsa / Getty Images)