National Basketball Association

The Lost Joel Embiid Workout Tapes

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

share

facebookxredditlink

foxsports

Grant Hughes is an attorney, National Featured Columnist for Bleacher Report and writer of other things elsewhere. Despite his basketball career being mostly over, Grant still regularly practices Euro-steps in Manu Ginobili’s honor. Follow him on Twitter @gt_hughes.

I’d always thought the other Joel Embiid workout tapes were myths. Whenever the public ones surfaced on Instagram or Embiid’s own Twitter feed, everyone would go apoplectic about his size, his skill, his strength.

But then there’d be whispers in the deepest reaches of Sixers subReddit or the lesser known NBA Darknet that there were more — many more, with each depicting some unfathomable feat from one of Embiid’s private training sessions. One showed him hitting 50 3-pointers in a row, some said. Another supposedly featured a dunk from the foul line.

I dug around for months, scouring the shadiest alleys (both real and virtual) for proof these secret tapes existed. I didn’t expect to find them…and then Sam Hinkie found me.

With nothing to lose and time to kill, he showed me the tapes.

—

“Is…is that…a 26-year-old Hakeem Olajuwon clone?” I asked, squinting at the images flickering on the 17-inch Sanyo in Hinkie’s Palo Alto basement.

“Very perceptive,” Hinkie, former Sixers GM and deposed Process acolyte, replied. “David Stern had him cloned and cryogenically preserved back in 1989. Ever since, teams with promising prospects have paid the league an exorbitant sum to unfreeze Hakeem’s 26-year-old clone. Whenever you’ve got a big man you like, you can test him against the clone — if your owners are willing to pay through the nose. We got him for a whole day in 2015, and it cost $80 million. But, you know, Process, right?”

“You can’t be serious,” I snorted.

Hinkie settles into a folding chair nearer the TV. “Just watch,” he smirks.

It is then that Embiid appears on screen, towering over the clone. A ball rolls in from out of frame, and it begins: Embiid and the clone play one-on-one for 15 minutes. The Olajuwon clone is Olajuwon: impeccable footwork, deft hands, whirlwind spins and terrifying quickness.

Embiid destroys him.

Replicating Olajuwon’s every move as if to mock him, Embiid does not just shake the Dream. He shatters him.

“We tried this with computer simulations first,” Hinkie interjects. “The machines always just quit.”

Scoring at will, Embiid also shuts out Olajuwon, anticipating each shimmy and dismissively swatting every attempted hook, flip and up-and-under attempt. What unfolds can only be described as cruel.

The score is something like 58-0, but keeping an accurate count is almost impossible. After just a few minutes of being annihilated, it’s clear the Olajuwon clone didn’t understand how any of this was happening, but before I could ask Hinkie one of the dozen questions surfacing in my mind, the scene on the Sanyo cut out.

For a few seconds, there was only static.

And then Embiid is in the frame alone, seated in a stark, sterile room. A single pendant light hangs above, illuminating an easel off to the side. Embiid is painting on it with his left hand. At the same time, the fingers of his massive right hand are rifling through three Rubik’s cubes at once, shifting sides and flipping colors in a multi-tonal blur. It’s like watching a spider encircling three captured flies in webbing at once. He’s not even looking at the cubes.

His left hand is deftly applying paint to the easel, and quickly you recognize the outlines of Picasso’s Guernica. He is done — cubes solved and perfect Guernica recreation complete — in 45 seconds.

Embiid turns to the camera and explains, bored, “I think this evokes a similar sense of the chaos inspired by the Spanish Civil War, but with a little more subtlety than that overwrought, subtlety-averse attention hog Pablo mustered. Don’t you agree?”

The feed cuts out again, and the clips get choppier now.

There’s Embiid shoulder pressing two Ford F-150s.

There he is giving Adele voice lessons. The scene lasts just three seconds, but you can tell he’s patronizing her.

Next, Embiid is subduing a white rhino in the wild by whispering in its ear.

Then he’s in a lab coat in front of a whiteboard, scribbling what, to most, are incomprehensible symbols. Hinkie interjects: “That’s pure mathematics — like from Good Will Hunting.”

I just nod.

Scribbling complete, the on-screen Embiid turns again to the camera and says matter-of-factly, “You know, that was actually easier than I thought. My calculations prove solving climate change and the energy crisis shouldn’t take more than two weeks as long as we carry the one and…”

The feed cuts out again

Hinkie has of course seen all this before. So he sits quietly through most of the footage, scrolling through Kayak.com on his phone in search of the best deals on Breckenridge hotels because he “had some snowboarding to do.”

Meanwhile, the montage continues apace: Embiid writing sonnets. Embiid making hundreds and hundreds of skyhooks from beyond the 3-point line. Embiid rescuing trapped miners.

It just keeps going, hours and hours and hours of heroism, perfect drop steps and feats of strength.

When it’s over, I am drained and horrified — genuinely fearful for what awaits the NBA in 2016 but grateful to know the truth: The tapes are real.

Hinkie raises an eyebrow. “How do you like the Process now?”

More from Hardwood Paroxysm

This article originally appeared on

share

Get more from National Basketball Association Follow your favorites to get information about games, news and more

in this topic

National Basketball Association