Joel Embiid is the largest NBA star making an attempt to ship Group USA males’s basketball its fifth-straight gold medal on the 2024 Paris Olympics.

Actually. 

Listed as 7-feet and 280 kilos, Embiid’s presence alongside LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and the remainder of Group USA makes an already imposing roster appear to be a humiliation of riches.

REQUIRED READING:Comply with USA TODAY’s full protection of the 2024 Paris Olympics

The Philadelphia 76ers middle averaged an NBA-best 34.7 factors per recreation through the 2023-24 season, only one 12 months faraway from being named the league’s most beneficial participant. He’ll staff with Los Angeles Lakers star Anthony Davis and Bam Adebayo of the Miami Warmth to type a trio of huge males in contrast to any on the earth.

However this will likely be Embiid’s first time taking part in a world competitors, and his path to those Olympics has been totally different from the remainder of his teammates. Embiid had choices, and his option to play for Group USA raised eyebrows stateside and overseas.

Right here’s what it’s good to find out about Embiid’s choice to symbolize the USA, and the way he wound up donning the pink, white and blue in Paris:

The place is Joel Embiid from?

Embiid was born in Yaounde, Cameroon and largely performed soccer and volleyball rising up there. He didn’t begin taking part in basketball till he was 15 years outdated. He moved to the USA a 12 months later after NBA participant and fellow Cameroon native Luc Mbah A Moute seen him at a basketball camp in Africa.

Embiid has performed within the states ever since then, rising as a five-star recruit at The Rock College in Gainesville, Florida, per his 247Sports Composite profile. He then performed one season at Kansas. Embiid was chosen by the 76ers with the No. 3 total choose within the 2014 NBA draft and has performed in Philadelphia throughout his whole skilled profession.

What nationality is Joel Embiid?

Born in Cameroon, Embiid additionally had the chance to play for France or his native nation within the Olympics. He gained citizenship to France in Could 2022 via a clause there that permits naturalization to a foreigner whose naturalization is “of remarkable curiosity.” Embiid then revealed in September 2022 that he had additionally grow to be a United States citizen, and cited his son because the motivation.

How is Joel Embiid taking part in for Group USA?

A 12 months later, when Embiid introduced he had dedicated to play for Group USA in Paris, his household’s connection to the USA was the figuring out issue.

“It was not simple,” Embiid wrote in a publish on X (previously Twitter) explaining his choice in October 2023. “I’m blessed to name Cameroon, France, and the USA house. “After speaking to my household, I knew it needed to be Group USA. I need to play with my brothers within the league. I need to play for my followers as a result of they’ve been unbelievable for the reason that day I got here right here. However most of all, I need to honor my son who was born within the US. I would like my boy to know I performed my first Olympics for him.”

MORE:Group USA males’s and girls’s basketball odds at 2024 Paris Olympics

Was Embiid’s choice to affix Group USA controversial?

It actually has been in France.

When Embiid was granted French citizenship, hypothesis instantly adopted that he was planning to symbolize France two years later when it hosted the Olympics. There was the potential to staff with Victor Wembanyama and Rudy Gobert.

Former NBA participant Boris Diaw, who at the moment serves as the final supervisor of the French nationwide staff in males’s basketball, insisted to The Athletic that Embiid approached a number of instances through the 2021-22 NBA season about his curiosity in taking part in for France.

When France beat the USA 83-76 through the 2020 Olympics, snapping Group USA’s 25-game successful streak in Olympic competitors, Embiid even tweeted, “Allez les Bleus” in celebration.

“Joel got here to us and mentioned that he wished to play worldwide basketball, he mentioned he wished to win, and he mentioned he wished to play for France and he wished to win with France,” Diaw informed The Athletic. “So we listened to him.”

This led French officers to bypass the everyday routes to realize citizenship. Embiid didn’t have direct French heritage, nor had he lived in France for at the least two years. However he and his son have been granted a French passport due to what France may accomplish on the Olympics with him.

Embiid, nevertheless, by no means did play for France, and selecting to play for the USA was not met kindly by the French. 

“Group USA, with him, who can beat you? Come on, no person,” French Basketball Federation president Jean-Pierre Siutat informed The Athletic. “That is a simple method for him to get an Olympic medal.”

Frederic Weis — the previous French nationwide participant who infamously acquired dunked on by Vince Carter through the 2000 Olympics — took it much more personally.

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“I hate him for the issues that he did. I feel he does not have any respect for France and likewise for all of the people who find themselves asking for a French passport and do not get it. And below the pretext that he’s an ideal athlete, he acquired it,” Weis mentioned in April, by way of Eurohoops.web. “I discover it scandalous, I discover it embarrassing. I do not care about his excuses, as a result of they’re his phrases, and his phrases imply nothing.

“I might take away from him the French nationality and I might ban him from getting into France,” Weis added. “You’ll not play within the Olympics. You’ll come to the airport with Group USA and we’ll say, ‘You do not have the fitting to enter the territory, go to your property. You might be Cameroonian, you might be American, you aren’t French, go away.'”

Through the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, Group USA teammate Tyrese Haliburton jokingly sounded an analogous chorus in a video posted on his Instagram account.

“Give your passport again,” Haliburton mentioned.

“I am American, man,” Embiid responded, waving a miniature American flag from the boat carrying the USA delegation of athletes alongside the Seine River through the parade of countries.

Embiid mentioned in July at Group USA coaching camp he isn’t apprehensive a couple of impolite reception when he arrives in Paris.

“I do not assume it must be something, but when it is greater than that, I embrace it,” Embiid informed The Athletic. “I do not assume you may get worse than taking part in in New York within the playoffs.”

Who else born exterior the USA has performed for Group USA?

Hakeem Olajuwon (born in Nigeria) and Patrick Ewing (born in Jamaica) are probably the most well-known earlier examples of naturalized residents to symbolize the USA in males’s basketball on the Olympics.

Joel Embiid profession highlights

Embiid didn’t play his first two years within the league because of a lingering foot damage. However within the eight seasons since then, he has amassed fairly the resume. Listed below are a few of his notable accomplishments:

• 2022-23 NBA MVP
• 7-time NBA All-Star
• 5-time all-NBA choice (first staff in 2023, second staff in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022)
• 2-time NBA scoring champion (2021-22 and 2022-23)