Guerschon Yabusele’s build and NBA journey are unorthodox, but the Frenchman has looked every bit a guy that belongs while playing for the struggling Sixers.
When the Sixers bless us with a season like this one, their paying customers may be excused if they are driven to distraction on any given game night — if not by the thrumming music, entreaties to MAKE SOME NOISE and T-shirt barrages, then by the paying customers’ own flights of fancy.
As the team clunks along, maybe it’s best to let your imagination be your guide.
A case in point came during a December game against Orlando. Sixers forward Guerschon Yabusele, who goes 6-foot-8 and 265 pounds and was bestowed a predictable nickname — “Dancing Bear” — during his previous NBA incarnation (Boston, 2017-19), collected the ball at the top of the circle and began rumbling toward the hoop.
Surely this wouldn’t end well. Surely someone would end up splattered on the stanchion, or the ball would end up in the third row.
But no. In mid-journey Yabu deftly hook-passed to a cutting Kelly Oubre Jr. for a dunk. It was a brilliant play, especially for someone of Yabusele’s stature, and at least one observer (that would be me) couldn’t help but think that given his size and agility he might be as well-suited to playing on the other side of 11th Street, in Lincoln Financial Field, as he is the Wells Fargo Center.
Never mind that Yabu has never actually played football — not the American kind, anyway. Growing up in France he prefaced his hoops career by playing soccer (of course) and rugby, and also did a little boxing. Be that as it may, couldn’t you picture Yabu in pads?
“Everybody tells me that,” he said one day in December, as he sat courtside in the Sixers’ practice facility. “Since when I was in Boston, everybody used to tell me that, for sure.”
And?
“And I want to,” he said. “I want to try it one time.”
Understand that Yabusele wasn’t saying he wanted to suit up for the Eagles next week, next season or, really, ever. The NFL was never mentioned in our conversation. All he was saying is that the sport intrigues him, that it appeals to his competitive nature.
But again, let your imagination run as wild as Saquon Barkley in the open field. That’s what Brandon Graham, the Eagles’ injured edge rusher (and an occasional attendee at Sixers’ games), was asked to do in a recent phone interview.
Graham was happy to play along, saying he could see Yabusele giving football a try. In fact, Graham has seen interesting transitions, as when his Australian-born teammate, Jordan Mailata, transformed himself from a rugby player into one of the NFL’s best offensive tackles. So why not another one?
“I think if he got somebody behind him that believed in him and let him work,” Graham said of Yabu, “it would be a good project for a couple years, to see where he can go.”
Enough fantasy, though. Let’s return to reality, to what we know for certain. And that is this: Yabusele is an NBA player. That wasn’t clear before this season. But after he false-started with the Celtics, he fine-tuned his game overseas for five seasons and became an Olympic hero in his native France last summer.
And now, he said, he is taking advantage of his “second chance.” Not his last chance, even though, at age 29, he is no longer a young, up-and-coming prospect. A second chance. A do-over.
Certainly he has shown himself to be more of a finished product now. Certainly his international experience has left him with a firm grasp of screening and spacing, the result being that he’s a big guy adept at making little plays. A guy who not only has his splashy moments, but those that change the flow of a game, while barely making a ripple among casual observers. A guy, ultimately, who has made winning plays for a losing team.
“He’s exceeded, I think for sure, what we kind of had him penciled in on paper, going into training camp,” coach Nick Nurse said.
Veteran wing Caleb Martin wouldn’t go that far, for understandable reasons. Martin, undrafted out of college six years ago, has fashioned a more-than-respectable career, first in Charlotte, then in Miami and now here. He fully appreciates those following a similar path.
“Obviously anybody who gets signed in this league, I know they’re capable,” Martin said. “But has he been a blessing to the team? I’ll say that.”
And more. Yabusele, Martin added, has been “one of the biggest bright spots to our team.”
True. Even as Joel Embiid has been hurt, fined or suspended, and even as other injuries have hit and the losses have piled up, Yabu has served as a beacon of hope, not only because of his play but his personality. Martin called him “a great dude,” and certainly his teammates react to his best moments as they do few others; every time he dunks, it seems, they explode with unbridled, chest-pounding glee.
“He’s just a good person, man,” Tyrese Maxey said. “You like to see good people like that succeed.”
During that December game against Orlando, Yabusele displayed not only his full Dancing Bear-ness on the play involving Oubre but a great deal more. He knocked down open three-pointers, which before this season had been one of the bigger questions about his game. He screened tirelessly. He made the extra pass.
He finished with 15 points, seven rebounds and four assists in nearly 37 minutes of action. He was also a team-best plus-10. Yet the Sixers lost again.
Not long after Yabusele fashioned a 17-point outing against his much-ballyhooed countryman, Victor Wembanyama, in a victory over the Spurs. That triggered a nine-game stretch in which he averaged nearly 13 points a game while shooting 54 percent from the floor and 48 percent from the arc, pushing his season average to 10.1 points a game, on .500/.401/.687 shooting splits. His numbers have remained in that range ever since, as has his rebounding rate of five a night.
Along the way, there were other highlights. A dunk against San Antonio, after a cut from the right corner and a Kyle Lowry feed. Another against Portland, following a kick-ahead pass from Martin. Yet another against Brooklyn, on a drop-off from Paul George.
And each time there has been all that chest-pounding on the part of his teammates, a celebration that was the brainchild of Maxey and KJ Martin.
“It just fits him, we feel like,” Maxey said.
Yabusele has shown he fits here after playing well for European power Real Madrid the last three years and the French national team in the Paris Olympics. Those Games saw him average 14 points a game and posterize LeBron James while scoring 20 against Team USA in the gold-medal game, a game ultimately decided by Stephen Curry’s fireworks display in the closing minutes.
Yabusele had remained on the NBA’s radar even after the Celtics cut him in 2019, following two seasons in which he played neither very much (6.6 minutes a game over 74 appearances) nor very well (2.3 points, 1.4 rebounds per game). He headed off to play in China, then in France before landing with Real Madrid, and scouts saw changes. Changes in his body and his shot. Changes in his understanding of the game. (It stands to reason that he changed as a person, too; he and his wife Sara became parents to a son, now 4, and a daughter, now 2, during his NBA interregnum.)
One personnel type, having watched as Yabusele’s team ran its offense through him at the European championships a few years ago, told me it is not unusual for a player to go overseas to find himself, to figure things out. And it was clear long before the Olympics that Yabu had; the Games just provided an exclamation point.
Nurse said Sixers personnel chief Daryl Morey floated the idea of bringing Yabusele to Philadelphia almost immediately afterward. Yabu, for his part, said there were “at least” five teams interested — one of them almost certainly Cleveland, seeing as Cavaliers head coach Kenny Atkinson served as an assistant for the French national team.
That Yabusele landed in Philadelphia is due not only to fit but the recommendations of the Frenchmen who preceded him here — Nico Batum last season and, a few years earlier, Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot. They gave their endorsement and in the case of TLC literally showed him the lay of the land when Yabusele came to town in 2017-18, his first season with the Celtics and the last of two Luwawu-Cabarrot spent with the Sixers.
“I’ve been around the city,” Yabu said. “I definitely think that this was a great opportunity.”
He hails from Dreux, France, a town of 30,000 about an hour west of Paris. It is a haven for immigrants — about 25 percent of the population falls into that category — and his parents (his dad is named Monzali, his mom Monzia) had come there from the Democratic Republic of Congo years before Guerschon, the third-oldest of their five children, was born in 1995.
Monzali, who had been a boxer back in Congo, was the one who introduced Guerschon to the sport, when he was very young. Brought him to the school in town where Monzali instructed local kids in the finer points of the sweet science, and put young Yabu through his paces.
“I was hitting his hands, not the bag,” Guerschon said. “Like he has the pad, and I was just hitting a little bit.”
He came to enjoy being in the gym, and everything boxers put themselves through. And while he never had an actual fight, he did do some sparring.
“My dad always had hope — like he loved it when I was boxing, and he was really pushing me,” Yabu said. “I was just built for it, I would say, because that’s what I’ve known my whole life, kind of.”
But before long he gravitated to hoops. Developed so quickly, in fact, that he turned pro in 2013, when he was in his late teens. Three years later — after two seasons in his native land and another in China — the Celtics made him the 16th overall pick in the 2016 draft.
Things didn’t work out there, but now he has had a reset. Now it is clear he belongs in the NBA. But the question going forward will be whether he belongs in Philadelphia. He signed a one-year, $2 million contract last summer, and will be an unrestricted free agent when this season reaches a merciful conclusion.
No matter the outcome, it seems clear he’s going to get paid. He has redefined his career, redefined himself. You don’t need much imagination to see that. Other stuff, maybe. But definitely not that.