Guerschon Yabusele rewrites his NBA story with Sixers, erasing ‘what-if’ feeling from Boston exit

One phone call changed everything for Yabusele, who thought his NBA career was over after being waived by the Boston Celtics. Now with the Sixers, he gets a full-circle moment on Christmas Day.

Guerschon Yabusele has carved out a role in Philly after Boston waived him. That sparked a five-year stretch outside of the NBA.Read moreElizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer

by Gina Mizell

Published Dec. 25, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

When Danny Ainge walked into that Las Vegas hotel lobby, Guerschon Yabusele immediately recognized that the executive’s demeanor was off.

“You know when we say, ‘The eyes don’t lie?’” Yabusele recently said of that meeting, which occurred during 2019 NBA Summer League. “I could tell something was going on.”

Ainge, then the Boston Celtics’ president of basketball operations, delivered the news to Yabusele that the team would waive him. Though the former first-round draft pick had not played much during two seasons with the Celtics, the conversation still left Yabusele stunned. And it closed an NBA door that remained shut for five years, sending Yabusele’s worldwide basketball journey to China for a second time, then back to his home country of France, then to European power Real Madrid.

“I know how hard it is to come back [to the NBA],” Yabusele said.

But the man once nicknamed the “Dancing Bear” reintroduced himself on a grand stage, with an Olympics performance — including a monster dunk on LeBron James — that showcased his improvement during that time away from the league. The 76ers moved quickly to sign the 29-year-old to a one-year, veteran-minimum contract. Since then, he has become one of the team’s steadier performers to inject a pleasant surprise into a disappointing season.

The 6-foot-8, 265-pounder is only one of two Sixers from an injury-riddled roster to play in all 27 games, occupying both big-man spots as a three-point shooting threat, strong-bodied rebounder, and agile defender. He is averaging 9.4 points, production that coach Nick Nurse acknowledges has exceeded expectations from “what we kind of had him penciled in on paper going into training camp.”

“I just don’t understand how he wasn’t in the league for five years,” teammate Kelly Oubre Jr. said recently. “… He’s like a teddy bear off the court, but on the court, he is a grizzly bear.”

On Christmas, Yabusele returns to Boston to face his former team in a high-profile matchup. To get here, it took him channeling the disappointment and uncertainty of that first NBA shot slipping away — and seizing a second chance that he recognizes is rare.

“You’ve got to go through it,” Yabusele told The Inquirer from the Sixers’ practice facility earlier this month. “Sometimes when they ask me to talk to the kids or some people come up to me, I’m like, ‘Listen, I know you hear this everywhere, but you’ve got to work hard.’ …

“‘Whatever situation you go through, even if you think it’s the end of the world, you’ve got to do that. At the end of the day, if you work and you really want to make your dream come true, it’s going to get you [there].’”

Yabusele initially needed to be coaxed into playing basketball when Farid Dali, a local professional player, stopped by to teach the game at a young Yabusele’s after-school program.

“I didn’t really understand it,” Yabusele said. “I couldn’t see what he was seeing in me.”

Yabusele also was more interested in soccer and boxing while growing up with his four siblings in Dreux, France, located 50 miles west of Paris. But when he finally relented, he “fell in love” with basketball.

He noticed other kids wearing NBA jerseys, and started studying those players and teams. He watched Kobe Bryant highlights on YouTube “every day,” then tried to reproduce those moves outside. When he conceded that his future was as a big man — “this was something hard for me to let go,” he jokes today — he turned to Shaquille O’Neal, Larry Johnson, and Charles Barkley.

Still, Yabusele did not realize he had a professional future until he signed his first contract as a teenager in 2013 with Chorale Roanne Basket, a second-tier French team. He then moved on to Rouen Metropole in 2015, and, a season after that, to the Chinese Basketball Association’s Shanghai Sharks. He averaged 20.9 points and 9.4 rebounds during an All-Star season with Shanghai, prompting the Celtics to select him 16th overall in the 2016 NBA draft.

“This was one of my biggest achievements in life,” Yabusele said. “… From that moment, everything in my life was different. I was just glad and happy to be here and couldn’t wait just to learn and get better.”

He joined a Celtics team boasting young versions of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Marcus Smart, as well as veterans such as Kyrie Irving, Al Horford, and Gordon Hayward. That deep roster — which made an Eastern Conference finals run in 2018 — meant the bulk of Yabusele’s development occurred behind the scenes with then-assistant Jamie Young, who also was on the Sixers’ staff from 2021 to 2023 and is now an assistant at Villanova.

“J.Y., when are we working out?” Young recalls Yabusele constantly asking him, with a disposition the coach describes as “gentle” and “just a likable human.”

So they drilled post moves and rebounding, prompting fellow assistant Micah Shrewsberry to bestow the “Dancing Bear” nickname because of Yabusele’s blend of strength and athleticism for his size. He improved his shot and understanding of defensive schemes.

Even after the Celtics landed following road trips, Yabusele said, he sometimes went back to the facility at 3 or 4 a.m. “because I couldn’t really sleep.” He also credits veterans such as Horford, Aron Baynes, and Marcus Morris Sr. with “talking to me the whole time, pushing me.” And whenever he did get in a game, “every loose ball, I was just jumping.”

“I was like, ‘[I’ve] got to play with energy,’” Yabusele said.

Yabusele, though, only averaged 6.6 minutes in 74 games over those two seasons, which also included time with the G League’s Maine Celtics. Still, the Celtics had picked up his option for the 2019-20 season the previous fall, reportedly in hopes he would improve to the team’s satisfaction and to keep his contract as a trade asset.

So when Yabusele relayed that the Celtics had cut him, his agent also was surprised. It was after the early-July free-agency rush, making it difficult to find another NBA team.

“I feel like I failed, kind of,” Yabusele said. “… I feel like I didn’t get the real chance to be over there, to prove myself and see if I could fit or not. I was leaving with a taste of ‘if.’ It was like, ‘If this … if this …’ and I didn’t like it.”

Yabusele went back to China, signing with the Nanjing Monkey Kings for what he now describes as “one of my worst experiences.” He injured a knee and was not being paid on time, he said. He was not comfortable with the food, leading to a diet primarily of rice that caused him to “lose weight like crazy.” His wife was pregnant. And for those few months, he was in his own head.

“You’re looking back, like, ‘Damn,’” Yabusele said. “You start questioning a lot. It’s 100 miles an hour. … After a while, I feel like the life was just not good, especially for her.”

Yabusele returned home to France, where he was unattached to a team for about six weeks. He countered his still-racing mind with daily morning workouts because “I didn’t want this situation to be me.

“It was good that I was thinking about it, too,” he said. “Because it made me work. It made me push myself and figure it out.”

He eventually signed with ASVEL, a top-level French team located just outside of Lyon and run by Hall of Famer Tony Parker. After a couple games, the world shut down because of the COVID-19 pandemic. But when sports resumed, Yabusele approached a full season with a refreshed, let-it-go mindset. He averaged 11 points and 4.2 rebounds in 30 Euroleague games and also helped ASVEL win the 2021 LNB Pro A championship — prompting Parker to leave Yabusele with a parting message of, “If [any NBA teams] ask me, I will say good things about you,” the player said.

Yabusele also caught the attention of Real Madrid, one of Europe’s premier clubs. In an email to The Inquirer, coach Chus Mateo described Yabusele as a “game-changer for our style of play” because he could run in transition, put the ball on the floor to attack the rim powerfully, and jump passing lanes as a defender. His three-point percentage also jumped sharply to 46.1% in 2023-24, making him a legitimate threat to stretch the floor.

He also felt the impact of being entrenched in Real Madrid’s winning — and demanding — “DNA,” noting “it really felt like an NBA team over there.” Mateo fondly remembers when they won the Spanish Super Cup during Yabusele’s first season, and teammates chanted his name once he arrived for the celebration. After that, Real Madrid won two more Super Cups, two Liga ACB titles, and the 2023 Euroleague championship.

Off the court, Yabusele and his family easily settled into Madrid’s “amazing” city environment, saying they happily would have stayed had an NBA opportunity not surfaced.

But, as Sixers teammate Caleb Martin said recently: “I think everybody saw [Yabusele] in the Olympics.” That string of performances — averaging 14 points and 3.3 rebounds in six games, including 20 points (and that posterizing dunk) in the gold-medal game against the Team USA — did not surprise Nico Batum, the former Sixer and longtime French national team member.

“I always say [reigning NBA Rookie of the Year Victor Wembanyama] was the most important player we had, but Guerschon was the best player we had for the last two years,” Batum said. “… He just [exploded], and we, as a team, were a different team as soon as he got back in the lineup.”

Within a couple days after the Games, Nurse learned that the Sixers’ front office was pursuing Yabusele to fill a void at power forward and complete a widely praised offseason revamp. Though Mateo knew Yabusele’s Olympic performance would garner interest, the Madrid coach still “didn’t expect him to leave our team so quickly, and it was a huge loss for us because he fit so well into the team’s structure.”

The call from Yabusele’s agent happily interrupted his post-Olympics Caribbean vacation. And when Yabusele floated the possibility by Batum — who said he was trying to persuade the Los Angeles Clippers, the team he rejoined as a free agent, to offer Yabusele a deal — Batum’s advice was “Go.”

“You’ll love everything here,” Batum said he told him. “The coach is great. Teammates. City. Fans. Arena. Everything. You’ll love it. I’m glad he chose this city.”

Before the Sixers’ first preseason home game in mid-October, Yabusele got lost in the sports complex’s vast parking lot.

“I’m driving for like five minutes,” Yabusele said with a chuckle and wide grin. “And then I’m turning around, and I saw [rookie Jared McCain], and he was following me. We get next to each other, and I was like, ‘I have no idea where I’m going,’ and he’s like, ‘Me too!’

“And then the security guy, after five minutes, was like, ‘Just follow me.’”

It was a lighthearted “welcome back to the NBA” moment. Another arrived when reporters surrounded Yabusele at his locker inside Boston’s TD Garden ahead of an Oct. 12 Sixers-Celtics exhibition matchup. After Yabusele reflected on his time with the Celtics during the short interview session, one local media member told The Inquirer that they instantly noticed he had visibly matured.

That immediate readiness has been necessary during a Sixers season in which 2023 NBA MVP Joel Embiid has been sidelined for all but eight games and several other players have sustained injuries.

Yabusele has played center and power forward alongside Embiid or Andre Drummond, and started 10 games. He has shot 38% on 3.7 three-point attempts per game. He amassed a career-high 22 points in a Nov. 27 overtime loss to the Houston Rockets and finished with double-digit points 11 times. Perhaps most comforting to Nurse is that “he doesn’t make a lot of mistakes at either end,” a luxury while the coach has toggled through several lineup combinations during the first quarter of the season.

And Yabusele hit the highlight reels again Friday night, when he got into the open court with the ball, sent Charlotte’s DaQuan Jeffries to the deck with a one-handed slam, and flexed both arms in celebration.

“Guys have been on him about dunking,” teammate Tyrese Maxey said after that game, “because we saw him dunk in the Olympics.”

Yabusele unleashed similar power following a recent Sixers practice, when he worked against staff members as one of the final players on the court. He finished the extra session by barreling through the lane and throwing down a dunk, which prompted player development coach Reggie Redding to holler “YABUUU!”

A few minutes later, Yabusele tells the story about that hotel lobby meeting with Ainge, which he remembers “like it was yesterday.” But that is no longer what slammed the door on his NBA dream.

He made it all the way back to a high-profile Christmas matchup against the team that let him go.

“I’ve got to be the hungriest on the court,” he said “So just try to help the team and play with a lot of energy and a lot of force. … I understand, also, that it’s rare to have a second chance in the NBA, so when I’m out here, I just try to compete the best that I can.”