PARIS — Even the smallest of steps forward would have been a welcome development for Joel Embiid in these Olympics, so it’s tempting to see his 15-point performance Saturday in Team USA’s 104-83 rout of Puerto Rico as a turning point for him. It might yet be. That game was Embiid’s best here in the Summer Games, and better than anything he did in any of the five friendlies that the U.S. played before arriving here. Still, the core questions surrounding Embiid’s role and effectiveness remain: Can he help the U.S. when he’s not its leading scorer? Is he willing and able to defer to some or most of his 11 teammates in the name of winning a gold medal?
Boiled down, what does Joel Embiid want out of the Olympics?
» READ MORE: Tyrese Maxey gives back to Philly with first ‘Friends & Family’ weekend — and pledges $1 million to youth programs
This is maybe the most intriguing Team USA-related storyline left in the tournament. The Americans face Brazil on Tuesday in the quarterfinals, and aside from a slow start in their opener against Serbia — a slow start to which Embiid was a major contributor — they haven’t planted a single seed of doubt about their chances here. They are too deep, too versatile, too talented to lose to any of these other teams. They’re going down only if they beat themselves, and that brief scare two Sundays ago was enough to snap them out of any complacency and keep them focused on what matters most here.
“We saw a switch flip,” coach Steve Kerr said Monday before Team USA practiced at the Marcel Cerdan sports complex. “We saw that against Serbia.”
Embiid can still be a part, a big one, of what should be a dominant run. But he has to remember that when he chose to play for Team USA, he chose, really, to ride the train, not to drive it. It has to be a strange feeling for him.
» READ MORE: Joel Embiid expects to learn ‘nothing’ from the Olympics. The way he’s playing, he’s right.
Think about it. When was the last time Embiid was not the best and most important player on his team’s roster? When was the last time he wasn’t a meal ticket? He has been that every season with the 76ers. You’d probably have to go back more than a decade, to his lone season of college basketball. You have to go back to that 2013-14 Kansas team with Andrew Wiggins — the No. 1 pick in the ‘14 NBA draft — with Perry Ellis, with Wayne Selden, with options beyond a freakish seven-foot freshman from Cameroon who was just three years removed from touching a basketball for the first time.
He could have created a more familiar dynamic, one more similar to the one with the Sixers, had he decided to play for his home country, Cameroon. He would have been the sun on that team and rendered every other member of it, with the exception of Pascal Siakam, a moon. And if Cameroon had managed to qualify for the Olympics, Embiid might be enjoying the kind of tournament that GiannisAntetokounmpo has for Greece: that of a brilliant player forced to do just about everything for his team, thriving individually for the roster’s lack of depth. Hell, at some level Embiid might have been happier in that scenario — little to lose, his status enhanced.
But that endeavor would have required a level of commitment that would have been difficult for Embiid to deliver. Without him, Cameroon went 1-5 in the 2023 FIBA African qualifiers — the event that South Sudan, by going 6-0, won to get to the World Cup, where it qualified for Paris. He would have had to carry Cameroon to the Olympics, let alone in the Olympics. There would never be so heavy a weight with the U.S.
And France? For all the jeering and booing that he has heard here, for all the wishful thinking that Embiid could have had used his fresh French citizenship to play for the Games’ host country, that situation would have presented its own complications. There are already two terrific seven-footers on France’s roster: Victor Wembanyama and Rudy Gobert. How would Embiid have had to adjust his game to accommodate theirs, and how would they have had to adjust to accommodate him? Would it have been any easier for him with France than it has been for him with Team USA?
That’s all conjecture. What’s not is that Embiid had spent 10 years assimilating to his new homeland and playing with and against the guys who are his Olympic teammates. “It was a tough decision, but it’s all about comfort level,” he told reporters. “I’ve known these guys for a long time, and I just felt more comfortable.” Team USA was in so many ways the easier route for him to take. The hard part was everything else, especially the higher standard that, by accepting USA Basketball’s invitation, he agreed to meet.
» READ MORE: At another Olympic Games, swimmer Katie Ledecky displayed the beauty of excellence yet again
Embiid has less FIBA experience than LeBron James, than Steph Curry, than Kevin Durant, than Jayson Tatum, Devin Booker, Jrue Holiday, or Bam Adebayo. A FIBA court is smaller than an NBA court. The game is shorter. On defense, teams pack the lane — there’s no penalty for defensive three seconds — and play zone more frequently.
“The difference between the NBA and FIBA is like the difference between speaking Spanish and Portuguese,” said Fran Fraschilla, who coached at three Division I programs and who has since spent years both coaching and scouting internationally. “They sound similar, but they are two different languages.”
And in Adebayo, Team USA already has a center who is inclined to accept being a role player, who comes out of a Miami Heat franchise where such unselfishness is a top-down edict and expectation from Pat Riley and Erik Spoelstra.
“We preach the same things: Keep the main thing the main thing,” Adebayo said. “If everybody’s about the right thing, and that’s winning, you’re not worried about shots. You’re not worried about minutes. You’re just going out there and competing and trying to win the game.”
That’s still the real test for Embiid during the rest of this tournament. He got his points against Puerto Rico, and maybe he’ll play another game like that before the week is out, and maybe that opportunity to shine on an international stage, for the best basketball team in the world, is all he was seeking here. But the lasting benefit for him out of these Olympics wasn’t never going to be found in a gaudy box score line. This is his chance to see and experience and contribute to a winning culture, to learn from those peers who have done and won what he hasn’t, to show that he’s capable of such sacrifice, too. Three games to gold. Joel Embiid still has time.