Joel Embiid and Isaiah Austin Join a Long Legacy of NBA Centers Betrayed by Their Bodies

Last night the NBA staged perhaps America's second-favorite nakedly capitalistic display of chattel acquisition on the part of depraved plutocrats desperate to protect their quasi-socialist monopoly. In one of their more tone-deaf moves to date, the league even laid claim to a young man who, due to his recent diagnosis of Marfan syndrome, had to remove himself from the list of the eligible.

By drafting Baylor center Isaiah Austin and slapping a generic NBA cap on his head, the league appropriated him and his story and marked them as NBA property, thus allowing his undoubted bravery and unbelievable dignity to redound to their credit, without having to cut him a check or anything. Steal of the night!

Austin was only the unluckiest big man to endure physical failure in the face of an NBA career, though, with his diagnosis heading off even the possibility of suiting up for a squad. Since the lottery system was implemented in 1985, literally dozens of huge men have been drafted into the league, only to fall prey to debility, injury, weakness, and doom. Naturally, before 1985, there were a number of famous/notorious cases of large failure, but the most prominent of these was Bill Walton, whose career was mangled by foot problems, but who still managed to earn an MVP and two championships, so maybe we can consign that era to the tender embrace of nostalgia. (Besides, the sentimentality usually attached to Walton's perceived failures probably belongs to poor Sam Bowie, who had all the injuries and all the setbacks without any of the actual victories.)

Let's take a romp through history, without sepia tones or sentimentality, shall we?

In 1985 and 1986's first rounds, NBA teams drafted more than 11 men of six feet eleven inches or taller. In that 70 feet of flesh, there were, to be sure, massive talents:

Patrick Ewing (1, 1985), Brad Daugherty (1, 1986) and Arvidas Sabonis (24, 1986) should satisfy any connoisseur. But, in honor of the new lottery system, there were also losers. There were lesser giants, whose bodies could only muster lengthy mediocrity. From 1985, this included Benoit Benjamin (3), Jon Koncak (5), Blair Rasmussen (15), and Bill Wennington (16); 1986 brought Brad Sellers (9). After that, we enter the realm of actual, factual, bodily badness. From Uwe Blab's (17) stylish rattail and Germanic inability to play basketball to Roy Tarpley's inability to not do cocaine, to Chris Washburn (3) and William Bedford's (6) combination of those lacks, it was a rough time for high men.

These themes of middling talent distributed through vast bodies and drug problems would recur for the next couple decades, supplemented by a seemingly endless supply of tall humans who simply had inadequate basketball skills. A few standouts, though: Alonzo Mourning (2, 1992), who came back from a kidney transplant to win a championship and join Bill Walton both in the actual Hall of Fame, and the hall of fame of guys whose careers and body-histories can be pressed into service of any story at all. Perseverance, time stolen, triumph, near misses, whatever: it's all on the table. Just behind these two looms the immortal very, very tall Zydrunas Ilgauskas, sort of a poor man's Walton stuffed into Arvidas Sabonis's majestic frame.

Luckily for Ilgauskas, he only inherited Walton's broken feet, and didn't suffer Sabonis's ruptured Achilles tendon (ripped when he fell down a flight of stairs … in the hospital, recovering from having torn his other Achilles). God's sense of humor. Anyway, like Walton and Mourning, Ilgauskas and Sabonis managed more than creditable careers after injuries both catastrophic and chronic.

Big men like these warp and distort the league: they're centers in as much a gravitational sense as the positional one. This is maybe best illustrated by Greg Oden (2007, 1), who commands constant attention, though almost never on the court. Few have generated more articles per minute of basketball played than Greg Oden, a seemingly good dude, cursed with a body that both demands he play basketball and denies him the opportunity to do so with any regularity. (He is doubly cursed by a reflective mind that from his entrance into public life was searching for other options. Making those of us with mouths somewhat nervous, this man with dinner-plate-sized hands has off and on talked of becoming a dentist.) He continues to tread water against the all-conquering forces of entropy, and even though his story is too much of a sick bummer to dwell on for long, one suspects he's in for more than his share of attention for a few seasons to come.

Similarly cursed by a deity turned malign and sadistic, Robert Swift (2004, 12) was something of a throwback to the class of 85/86, hamstrung by a ruined knee ligament before disappearing into, then disappearing from, a nightmare house, with a vomit-filled sink and a makeshift shooting range in the basement. Kwame Brown's (2001, 1) Gothic home was built by the nasty demigod called Michael Jordan. A complicated and maybe unknowable story, Brown was injured by Jordan's verbal abuse before a congeries of physical afflictions swarmed in 2004-5, 2006-7, and … pretty much all the time ever since. And no paragraph about curses could be complete without attention being paid to Andrew Bynum (2005, 10), whose knees would be a pretty good replacement for Odysseus in any epic about travails and misery. Dislocated left kneecap, torn right MCL, torn meniscus, hyperextension, bruises, arthritis, a bone bruise, degeneration, droopsy, dropsy, malaise, Morgellons, bad haircuts, detachable penis and The Fear. With these three, the strain to find some hope is nearly unendurable; makes it easy to understand the way they have crumbled under weight.

Whatever your opinion on the past—maybe past is prologue, maybe history repeats, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, maybe you think it recurs eternally and that that makes it either very, very heavy or unbearably light—what's come before is inevitably going to color your present. Joel Embiid was projected as the number one pick before undergoing surgery to fix a stress fracture in his foot—so long, Cleveland; the ghosts of the past hang ominously in the air. For the record: 2014, 3.

Will he be a Walton or Ilgauskas, an Oden or Bynum, a tragic Swift or one of the endless, faceless, like Duane Causwell (1990, 18) or George Zidek (1995, 22)? Will his surgery introduce him to the wonders of drugs, like Washburn and Tarpley and Beford? Will he in dominance or failure or whatever be a generous and reasonable guy, with pride and dignity, like Isaiah Austin or Dwayne Schintzius?

Probably none of these. Right now his story is essentially unwritten, like that of the yet-to-play Nerlens Noel (2013, 6), whose ACL tear ended his college career and has so far prevented the beginning of his professional one. Probably Joel Embiid will be a Joel Embiid, a 76er, whose story is his, but which belongs to the NBA, like Austin's.