Joel Embiid is happy to be the heel in his rivalry with France. Maybe he’ll grow up after he wins a gold medal.

PARIS — Joel Embiid loves France. He taunts France. He doesn’t think about France. He knows France has a great basketball team. He is not worried about France’s great basketball team. Sometimes Joel Embiid gets asked about France and doesn’t answer. Sometimes he gets asked about France and doesn’t stop talking.

He wanted to play for France in these Olympics. Actually, he only thought about playing for France in these Olympics. Actually, he had only two real choices for playing in these Olympics — the United States and Cameroon, or so he said Friday — and any suggestion otherwise is a storyline that other people are trying to will into existence.

Said it before. Saying it again: Embiid has no reservations about playing the heel, and for his two weeks here — two weeks building toward Saturday’s gold-medal game between the U.S. and France — he has used that time to (playfully?) antagonize people here at just about every opportunity.

They booed and jeered him from the instant he showed up, a sign of their disappointment and anger that Embiid, who became a French citizen in 2022, decided not to play for their national team. And he has been more than happy to either escalate or defuse the tension, depending on how seriously you take him and his antics.

Consider the immediate aftermath of Team USA’s 95-91 victory Thursday over Serbia. For a few minutes following the final buzzer, Embiid lingered on the court, raising his arms, pumping his right fist at the spectators inside Bercy Arena, then doing the “crotch-chop” as he walked off the court.

If he was worried at all about making himself a target or piling any more pressure on himself ahead of Saturday’s final, he didn’t show it.

“It’s all about Team USA against France,” Embiid said Friday. “But I know myself. I’m going to interact, and I’m going to enjoy it. They’re going to boo me. I’m going to go back at them and tell them to suck it. And so it’s going to be fun.”

One middle-aged man’s take: Knock if off, Joel. Yeah, the gesture is a popular move in pro wrestling and pop culture. Sure. Fine. There’s a segment of people who will dig it. But crotch-chopping a crowd, no matter how much garbage they’re dumping on you, is graceless. It’s classless. It’s juvenile. It’s the opposite of making it all about Team USA against France, and he did it at a moment when his performance could speak for itself: 19 points, a wonderful seven minutes of basketball down the stretch that helped turn the tide in his team’s favor and complete a wild comeback.

» READ MORE: Joel Embiid was his best when Team USA needed him most. He can carry the Sixers in the same way.

A little reserved … a little stoic … of course, that’s not Embiid. It never has been. When you use the word performance in reference to him, it means the whole schmear: the pregame and postgame quotes and the gesticulations and exhortations and the complaining whenever he thinks he’s been fouled and there’s no referee’s whistle to be heard and — oh, right — the basketball itself, which can be incredible when he’s on his game, like he was Thursday.

It’s all part of the Peter Pan package with him, including his insistence, when speaking with a cluster of French journalists, that the abuse he’s been getting here doesn’t bother him, that no one should take any of this stuff all that seriously.

“I don’t care,” he said. “The job is to win the gold. I’m not going to sit here and say I don’t love France. I do love France. I have lots of my people and have spent a lot of time here. It’s going to be fun. Like I said the other night, the banter against the fans, that’s love and respect. To me, I don’t think it’s anything negative.

» READ MORE: France reflects the toughness of ex-Sixer Nico Batum and reaches the gold-medal game

Look, if carnival barking helps Embiid stay engaged and up for a big game, or for any game, maybe it’s just the cost of business with him. Until Thursday, one could make a good case that Embiid was getting away with this behavior in this tournament because his high-powered Hall of Fame teammates were providing him enough cover. In Team USA’s three group-phase games, he was terrible against Serbia, didn’t see the floor against South Sudan, and was just OK against Puerto Rico.

Now he’s back to being the player he often is for the Sixers — an MVP candidate, one of the five to 10 best basketball players in the world — so he feels freer to let his freak flag fly when the cameras are on him or the micro-recorders are hovering in his face. Someone asked him Friday, during a Zoom call, what this, his first taste of international basketball, has been like, and he immediately jumped ahead four years to the 2028 Olympics … and to the country he may or may not play for.

“The next one is in L.A.; we’ll see,” he said. “I don’t know. It might be with Team USA. It might be with Cameroon. So we’ll see.”

Cameroon? Since Embiid has now participated in a sanctioned international tournament, both USA Basketball and FIBA would have to give him waivers before he could play for another country. Did he know that? Does he care? Doesn’t much matter either way. Embiid seems committed to the roles that he has embraced since his career in basketball began. He’ll play the bad guy. He’ll play the silly guy. For France, he’ll be the villain. For Team USA, he’ll be the lovable rascal who respects and torments one particular opponent.

Come Saturday night, he’ll probably be an Olympic gold medalist, too. Who knows what he might say or chop when that happens.