Perhaps he’d play volleyball, a sport he excelled at as a teenager. Maybe handball, his father’s game. “I was in a bad place,” says Embiid. “And that’s when all the stories were coming out every single day. ‘Oh, Joel, he doesn’t want to work. He’s a bust. He’s never going to play.’ There was all this bad stuff. And then you add my loss.” Embiid’s voice trails off. “People don’t understand the human side of all of it,” he says. “But I never complain about it. We make a lot of money. [Criticism] comes with it.”