Joel Embiid

Joel Embiid is a center for the Philadelphia 76ers, born in Yaoundé, Cameroon, where he played volleyball and football and did not pick up basketball seriously until he was fifteen. He moved to the United States as a teenager, spent one season at Kansas and was drafted third in 2014.

Foot injuries kept him off the court for his first two professional seasons, which made him the symbol of Philadelphia's long rebuild, and health has shaped every chapter since. When available he is a genuinely unusual player: a seven-footer who operates from the elbows and the three-point line as comfortably as the post.

He was named Most Valuable Player in 2023, the first Philadelphia player to win it since Allen Iverson. He holds Cameroonian, French and American citizenship, chose to represent the United States and won Olympic gold with them in Paris in 2024, and remains the player around whom every roster decision in Philadelphia is weighed.

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