Joel Embiid’s rise to NBA MVP: The Process and people who fueled him

Joel Embiid was playing tennis one of the first times Kevin Boyle saw him.

Boyle was the new head basketball coach at Montverde Academy, a private boarding school just outside of Orlando, Fla. After coaching Kyrie Irving and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist in the previous few years, he knew what elite high school talent looked like.

And when Boyle first saw the new transfer from Cameroon moving fluidly on the tennis court, he saw promise.

“I could tell in two minutes (that) this guy is going to be all right,” Boyle said. “You could see from his hand-eye coordination and his feet that as long as he had a competitiveness,” Boyle said. “If he was coachable and had competitiveness, and I found him to be both.”

But Embiid was a different type of player than Boyle’s past All-Americans. He was a blank canvas, entering his junior year of high school with almost no formal basketball experience. At powerhouse Montverde, he initially played on the junior varsity.

Learning a new sport, not everything came easy to Embiid initially. He would do things like dribble under the basket into an impromptu spin while falling out of bounds, a moment he would later bring up after becoming the subject of a “Jeopardy!” gaffe.

JOËL “DO A 180” EMBIID pic.twitter.com/reO1V3nCQt

— Joel “Troel” Embiid (@JoelEmbiid) March 5, 2020

Even if Embiid had tools like size and fluidity, there was a lot of work to do. But Boyle still saw the talent. When Embiid was practicing with the school’s varsity team, he would get in fights against physical players who were more advanced.

Sometimes, Embiid would get taunted.

“I remember calling the guys who were getting on him, guys busting each other’s chops,” Boyle said. “And I said to them, ‘One day, you guys — he said I threw him out of practice and told the guys that, and maybe I did, but I don’t remember it that way — any way, I told the guys, ‘One day, you’re going to ask him to borrow money. You know, watch what you’re saying.’ ”

Boyle turned out to be prescient with Embiid later confirming the story. Like Bill Self, Embiid’s college coach at Kansas, Boyle saw the high-level talent before the talented basketball neophyte did. At some point shortly after college, Embiid started to change. He gained the confidence level that his coaches previously had in him.

In many ways, Embiid’s basketball career was a rapid ascent. And yet, the journey to becoming the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, which he won on Tuesday night, was anything but straightforward.

In 2015, Billy Lange was out to dinner with his wife, Alicia, when he got a fateful text from Sam Hinkie, then the Sixers president of basketball operations: Embiid’s right foot was not healing as expected and he was going to need another surgery to repair the navicular bone in his right foot. He was going to miss a second straight season to begin his NBA career. To put it lightly, this was not a promising start.

At the time, Lange was a Sixers assistant coach and tasked with Embiid’s personal development. And when he called Embiid in the following days, Lange was surprised to find the 21-year-old wasn’t sad or upset.

“I’m not saying he was happy about it,” Lange said. “But everyone else felt way worse around him and was way more scared about what this could potentially mean for a man of his size.”

According to Lange, the confidence of Embiid’s previous coaches had rubbed off on him.

“He never doubted or wavered in that he could be what he is today,” Lange said. “So that was the driving force behind all this. And it showed a great level of patience and resilience to deal with all these things that he dealt with. While he was still growing and trying to become mature, and handling all this, he just believed that this was going to happen.”

Embiid faced on-court adversity during his first two years in Philadelphia, but nothing compared to the loss of his 13-year-old brother, Arthur. After his brother was struck by a truck while walking home from school in Cameroon, Embiid considered quitting the sport.

Eventually, Embiid returned to basketball. But Lange had trouble keeping his star engaged during workouts as he recovered from foot surgery. For long portions of those seasons, Embiid couldn’t do all that much since he had on a walking boot.

Most mornings, Embiid and Lange would head to the arena an hour before the team arrived for its shootaround. After Embiid was limited to sitting in a chair and practicing form shooting for a long period, Lange was seeking something else to work on. Both he and Embiid were bored.

“I mean, how much can you do that? You can’t do that (one drill) that much,” Lange said.

Lange needed to get creative. So for one workout in San Antonio, he put Embiid’s injured right foot on a chair and they practiced the Dirk Nowitzki one-legged fadeaway. When the rest of the team walked in and saw what they were doing, a group that included the coaching and training staff, there was some skepticism.

They got the go-ahead to continue the Nowitzki drill, which got Embiid and Lange through another month of monotonous rehab. And during that time, despite the unusual circumstances, Lange was amazed at how quickly Embiid was improving at the drill.

“We started talking about all the angles of how he would arc his back and where he would hold the ball,” Lange said. “And man, he picked up on it quickly.”

The Sixers lost 136 combined games in Embiid’s first two seasons. Even if “The Process” proved to be the correct team-building strategy, getting through those losing seasons is difficult for an organization. The on-court product didn’t offer much hope at all. In 2016, Hinkie resigned before Embiid, the future star he drafted, ever took the floor.

But behind the scenes, there was hope that the Sixers had a potential game-changer … if they could just get him healthy. Lange recalls a couple of postseason workouts in which Embiid scrimmaged against his teammates at the Sixers’ tiny practice facility. The other players were tired from a grueling NBA season, but after waiting all that time, Embiid was finally cleared to play.

“He was going at these guys like it was NBA Finals,” Lange said. “I mean, they were like, ‘Oh, we’re done. No one can handle this.’ And so you just saw what he was capable of because for him that was between the lines and it was basketball and ‘I have not yet played.’ And he annihilated them physically, mentally, emotionally. He just was on a different level.”

Before winning the MVP this season, Embiid was runner-up the previous two seasons. While he hasn’t avoided the injury bug completely, he has appeared in 134 combined games over the past two regular seasons. After his first few seasons, that level of durability was considered anything but a given.

your 2022-23 @Kia NBA MVP: @JoelEmbiid 🏆#KiaMVP pic.twitter.com/DNqnd5g9EY

— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) May 2, 2023

Lange, now the head coach at Saint Joseph’s University, hasn’t been on the Sixers staff since 2019. But in September 2022, he, Alicia and their four sons were invited to Embiid’s house in the Philadelphia suburbs. The same 20-year-old who used to mercilessly beat Lange’s sons in video games was having a birthday party for his one-year-old son, Arthur.

Embiid has reached incredible heights on the court and settled down off it. But according to Lange, that same confidence is still present.

“I still think he’s the same guy, I just think he’s matured,” Lange said. “The core of him is still the very same: Very simple, very peaceful, very faithful, ‘I knew this was going to happen, I knew I’d be good.’ Very confident.”

The scene in the Sixers locker room is the same after every game: win or lose. Embiid is intently watching his phone, while he soaks his feet in a bucket of ice. NBA League Pass is on the phone.

“No one watches games like he does,” Embiid’s longtime trainer Drew Hanlen said. “It’ll be like a random Tuesday in February or March and Joel will FaceTime me and will be like, ‘Yo, did you just see that move that happened in the third quarter of the Pacers–Magic game?’ And I’m like, ‘No, bro, why would I? Why would I see that move?’ ”

Hanlen has worked closely with Embiid for his entire NBA career. Embiid initially tracked down Hanlen at NBA Summer League in Las Vegas, asking for a workout. When Hanlen said that he couldn’t because he was traveling to Los Angeles the next day, Embiid responded, “All right perfect, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Anyone who has worked with Embiid will tell you that he’s an incredible visual learner. That skill is a major part of the reason he has improved so rapidly. If a coach tells Embiid to do something entirely new, he usually picks it up in just a couple of tries. That is a rare skill, even for elite basketball players.

One of Hanlen’s favorite Embiid stories combines those two traits, a story of a basketball junkie that also is a fast study.

After every one of Embiid’s games, Hanlen sends him a postgame edit breaking down his possessions. Essentially, it’s where he went right and where we went wrong. And in one of those edits, Hanlen said he noted that Embiid got stopped on a specific possession because he didn’t attack the defender’s “high foot.” Hanlen then showed a couple of examples of Kevin Durant, who’s a great scorer, executing the proper move.

“I was like, ‘That’s something we’re going to have to add this summer.’ And then I kept going on with the film edit,” Hanlen said. “And then the next game in the first quarter, he does that exact move and scores on it. I remember after the game, he goes, ‘Hey, did you see?’ ”

It’s one thing to become a perennial All-Star like Embiid was the second he stepped on an NBA court. But he wasn’t yet a perennial MVP candidate, which is one of the highest bars to clear in the sport. That required trial and error, film study and consistent skill development.

Not only did Joel Embiid average 33.1 points per game during the regular season, but also he added 10.2 rebounds, 4.2 assists, 1.7 blocks and shot 85.7 percent from the free-throw line. (Mitchell Leff / Getty Images)

When they first started working together, Embiid told Hanlen that he figured his offense would merely be a plus. The way Embiid figured it, he would be a dominant defender who could also score. After all, Embiid made one 3-pointer in his season at Kansas and shot 68.5 percent from the free-throw line.

But to win the MVP, to become one of the best players in basketball, Embiid needed to become a dominant offensive player.

Fast-forward a few years and Embiid has now won the scoring title in the past two seasons (30.6 points per game in 2021-22 and 33.1 in 2022-23).

“It just is a true testament to how much time he spent on the court and in the film room,” Hanlen said. “Basically, the approach has always been to attack one thing that can get you better each and every year.”

The progression has been steady. Embiid and Hanlen began in the mid-, low-post game. Then they worked more on the face-up game, midrange shots and jab-step jumpers. As Embiid improved, he also ran into postseason roadblocks, so he started to drift more to the perimeter.

The 7-foot, low-post scoring threat moving to more of a face-up game was certainly not a popular move at the time.

“Everyone was like, ‘He’s just got to duck in and be a bully,’ ” Hanlen said. “And while we love him getting paint touches, we love him getting deep seals, we love him doing all that, we just realized that you know, there’s a there’s a reason that no big man has been able to win a championship.”

The reason is that it’s easier for defenses to double-team in the low- and mid-post areas. Hanlen looked back at the best players on title teams over the past two decades. There haven’t been many low-post big men since Shaquille O’Neal spearheaded the Los Angeles Lakers dynasty.

When it came time for Embiid to study someone, Hanlen eventually honed in on the same player Lange had Embiid mimic years before. The aha moment came during an all-night session at Embiid’s condo in Philadelphia when they watched an edit of Nowitzki clips that spanned his entire career.

“We stayed up all night just watching the clips,” Hanlen said. “And that was when we were like, ‘This is the answer, this is the solution.’ ”

Nowitzki shined in one area of the floor, particularly the elbow and nail areas around the free-throw line. So, Embiid changed his primary floor spot from post to the elbow and nail. In 2019-20, 47 percent of his offense came from the low post when you include passes, according to Synergy Sports. This season, that number was down to 24 percent. Embiid will still go down to the low block (he didn’t get smaller over the past few years), but he has diversified his offensive skill set.

There is some irony in Embiid winning the league’s most prominent regular-season individual award because he was focused on the challenges he encountered in the playoffs.

After learning the game and battling through adversity to play it, Embiid is now on a quest to continually improve at basketball. After being voted the best player in the best league in the world, the question is where he goes from here.

“He realistically thinks that he has not one more level, but multiple more levels to go,” Hanlen said. “And it’s one of those things, I believe him.”

Joel Embiid’s rise to NBA MVP: The Process and people who fueled him

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