@thesportsontap: There is a basketball court in North Philadelphia named for a boy who was 13. He never played on it. The building opened ten years after he was gone. A 70 foot mural looks down on that court. The face on it belongs to his older brother. His name is Joel Embiid. He grew up in Cameroon wanting to play soccer, sneaking out of the house to go find a game. His father pointed him somewhere else. "Nobody in Cameroon plays basketball," his dad told him. "You can play volleyball." So he played volleyball. He was 16 when Luc Mbah a Moute came home to run a basketball camp and invited him to it. He had been playing the sport about three months. A high school in Florida offered him a spot anyway. "When I came over from Cameroon at 16, I didn't know any English," he said. He learned to shoot off YouTube clips. One season at Kansas. Third pick in the 2014 draft. Then two surgeries on the same foot and no professional game until October of 2016. In 2014, while he was in America, his family lost Arthur. The boy was 13. Joel had been gone for years. When he went back, the stories came from people who had been there when he was not. "It's funny, all the stories that I heard, because I hadn't been around since I left Cameroon," he said. "He was someone that cared about everybody." In 2020 he and Anne had a son. They named him Arthur Elijah. Then they put the name on a floor. The court at the Alan Horwitz Sixth Man Center is called In Memory of Arthur. TONIGHT the Sixers beat Detroit and went to 8-1, the best record in the East. "There's no way, starting at 16, that I was supposed to be here," he said. There was no way. He got here anyway, and he brought a 13 year old's name with him. #NBA #nbanews #sixers #76ers #nbatiktok

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Thursday 05 November 2026 03:25:01 GMT