[From ESPN]

IT HAS TAKEN months to get here. Months of waiting, for Joel Embiid to play, for him not to play, for him to decide what, if anything, he wants to say about a season that once seemed so full of promise.

We're in his piano room. He's leaning back on a couch that seemed spacious until he eased his long body onto it. He's wearing a matching set -- pinstriped shorts and a camp collar shirt. His son, Arthur, peeks around corners from the hallway to see what we're up to. His wife, Anne de Paula, is upstairs preparing for her birthday celebration that evening. Decorations are being arranged in his dining room. It's the end of March, nine days before the knee surgery that will have a lot to say about Embiid's basketball fate.

He used to have fun with interviews. Before he ever played a game in the NBA, while he spent two years on the shelf rehabbing from surgeries to his right foot in the summers of 2014 and 2015, he was a media darling, both wry fabulist and helpless confessor.

But not after this past year. These days, he's wary, a little distracted by the Phillies game he's watching on his phone. I wonder if he might politely show me the door. We make small talk for a bit. He looks bored.

Read more of ESPN's story HERE