Dikembe Mutombo, the most unappreciated Sixers great and Joel Embiid’s role model, dies at 58

He was the missing piece. The best defender. The Hall of Fame glass-master.

There’s no way the 76ers reach the NBA Finals in 2001 without the deadline addition of Dikembe Mutombo. He was the centerpiece of a trade that sent principals Toni Kukoc and Theo Ratliff to Atlanta, but it’s astonishing how little credit Mount Mutombo gets for helping the Sixers climb that mountain — a mountain they haven’t climbed in the 23 years since.

Maybe that’s because the Sixers lost those Finals in five games and Shaquille O’Neal, offended that Mutombo said he didn’t need defensive help, averaged 33 points, 15.8 rebounds, and 3.4 blocked shots in the series.

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Maybe that’s because Allen Iverson’s star shone so brightly that season, his only MVP run. Maybe that’s because Mutombo was a Sixer for only 134 games; after a first-round exit the following season the Sixers, who had added a fading Derrick Coleman, traded Mutombo, then 36, to the Nets for Todd MacCulloch and Keith Van Horn.

Maybe that’s because what Mutombo did best — block shots, alter shots, deter drives, rebound, and fire outlet passes — had, by then, become so unappreciated by fans and writers who had grown progressively unsophisticated that he was taken for granted.

The real ones knew.

The real ones mourned Monday, when Mutombo died of brain cancer at the age of 58. He was brilliant (he spoke nine languages) and gentle, kind and elegant (he always dressed well), and so, so talented. He made the most of his life and made life better for those around him, both off the court and on.

He was an inspiration for dozens of the more than 70 African-born players who have reached the NBA and the hundreds who have played in other leagues around the world, including the best African-born player alive.

“It’s a sad day, especially for us Africans,” said Sixers center Joel Embiid. “And really the whole world. He’s one of the guys I look up to as far as having an impact. He did a lot of great things for a lot or people. He is a role model of mine.”

Embiid was a 3-year-old in Cameroon and a dozen years from finding basketball the night I became a Mutombo believer. It was April 9, 1997, and I sat deep on press row, about 40 feet from the court at the brand new Wells Fargo Center. Mutombo, then with the Atlanta Hawks, blocked three straight dunk attempts by Clarence Weatherspoon, then the Sixers’ most accomplished player.

I thought Mutombo’s finger wag was an unsportsmanlike taunt, and so did most of the NBA, but that was a different era, and it became his expensive trademark: “I used to get fined $1,000,” he told Graham Bensinger in 2017. “This finger wave cost me a lot of money, man.”

At the direction of late NBA commissioner David Stern, Mutombo modified the finger wave by facing the crowd, not his opponents, but like Iverson’s crossover, it was Mutombo’s signature move. It also laid a foundation for a hilarious commercial in his later life.

I was an Eagles beat writer back then, and I attended that night to witness a different former Georgetown Hoya, Iverson, who was on his way to winning Rookie of the Year. A.I. dropped 40 that night, along with nine assists and eight rebounds, the second of five straight games in which he scored at least 40 points, and his near triple-double overshadowed Mutombo’s six points, 11 rebounds, and six blocks, but his Hawks won, and the real ones knew who controlled that game.

Mutombo always operated on a different cerebral level. He had the goods to do so.

Mutombo landed at Georgetown as a pre-med student on a scholarship from the United States Agency for International Development, but Hall of Fame coach John Thompson saw his lithe, 7-foot-2 frame and convinced Mutombo that he could use basketball as a vehicle to more good than he’d ever manage as a physician.

When I saw him that night in 1997, Mutombo had been to four of his eight All-Star games, was on his way to his second of four Defensive Player of the Year awards, and, four years earlier, had led the Nuggets to the second round of the NBA playoffs. He would reach the postseason 13 times in his 18 seasons with all six of the teams for whom he played — the Nuggets, Hawks, Sixers, Nets, Knicks, and Rockets.

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But 1996-1997 was peak Mutombo, both on the court and off.

Later in 1997 he established the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation, dedicated to improving conditions in his homeland, the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo. His efforts eventually helped open a new hospital in 2007 named after his mother, who had died in 1998 because she couldn’t receive prompt medical care. In 2021, his efforts helped open a school named after his late father. The students call him “Papa Mutombo.”

He was a tireless advocate for the Special Olympics and Unified Sports. My daughter is a Unified Sports ambassador at her high school. It’s funny how people like Mutombo can touch your life without you even knowing it.

It is a delightful juxtaposition of context that Mutombo’s iconic NBA moment, the one frozen on most folks’ memories, involves not him skying 11 feet in the air to block a shot or snag a rebound. Rather, it is Mutombo lying on the court, a ball clasped between two giant hands and raised, triumphant, after the Nuggets, the eighth seed, overcame an 0-2 deficit and beat Seattle, three games to two, in the first round of the 1994 playoffs. It is a moment of unadulterated joy, a moment of validation, unrehearsed and authentic and utterly pure.

Sixers president Daryl Morey, a fearless humanitarian and a citizen of the world, choked up when he reflected on the passing of Mutombo.

“There are not many guys like him,” Morey said. “An amazing human being, what he did off the court for Africa. Rest in peace, Dikembe.”

Rest in peace, indeed.