Joel Embiid Is Heading For Beast Mode

The Lion Killer

To set the stage, I found a perfect story about Joel Embiid in the The Kansas City Star written by Rustin Dodd.

"This is a story about Joel Embiid, the lion killer. It was late last summer, and the Kansas basketball team had gathered in the locker room for a post-workout tradition. The exercise was called “Thursday Vibes,” and it was pretty simple. The players would go around the circle, sharing secrets and stories. It was meant to be a team-building exercise, and Embiid, who had arrived on campus earlier that summer, was up next. The story came together quickly: Embiid had killed a lion back in Cameroon. “It wasn’t the king of the jungle,” Tharpe recalled. “It was like a nice-sized lion, and he said he killed it.” On that day, the story began. “JoJo killed a lion,” Tharpe said. “We weren’t going to question the man.” The only problem: Like a creation myth that keeps changing, becoming more exaggerated each time, Embiid’s story kept evolving. “First he told us this big lie about him and his tribe,” former teammate Niko Roberts said. “He had to go through this ‘becoming a man’ process. And he had to kill a lion with his bare hands. Then he tells us it was with a spear. Then the next time he might have shot the lion.” “I don’t know,” Roberts continued, smiling. “He was just the biggest liar on the team.” There were other cracks in the story. Embiid had grown up in the bustling city of Yaounde. His father, Thomas, a former handball player, had raised his two kids on a comfortable military salary. Young Joel took to soccer, enjoying the rhythms of the game. “I should have been a goalkeeper,” Embiid said, upon arriving at Kansas. “But I was a midfielder.” He never killed a lion, but he did dream of becoming one — an indomitable lion, the nickname of the Cameroon national soccer team. But then he found basketball. After arriving in the United States in 2011, he spent one season at Montverde Academy in Florida before transferring to The Rock School in Gainesville, Fla., to seek more playing time. During his days at The Rock, he would still play pickup soccer during lunch, but the focus was now on basketball. The game came easily to him. On one of the first days of practice, Justin Harden, the head coach at The Rock, began to install a set play to get his team into its motion offense. He instructed Embiid to do a dribble handoff at the top of the key, but instead of giving the ball up, he instinctively slipped through two defenders and attacked the lane. “And that’s an option also,” Harden called out. “He was an abstract thinker. He could see it.”"

From the moment he arrived to the Kansas Jayhawks, Jo Jo could see it. And if he could see it, he could do it and do it well.

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