How One Terrible Outfit Foreshadowed Jahlil Okafor’s Whole Sixers Career
by Boobie
The moment that many Sixers fans have been waiting for since the moment in June of 2015 when the Lakers took D’Angelo Russell with the second overall pick of the NBA Draft has finally come. Jahlil Okafor, the former NCAA champion and most polished low-post player to enter the league since George Mikan, is no longer a member of Philadelphia’s professional team. Okafor spent his entire Sixers tenure as a controversial figure, with Prokafor and Nokafor factions dividing families, friends, and comment sections alike. In retrospect, the Prokafor side of things seems even more misguided than it did in the moment, as Jah’s newly lean butt has remained stapled to the bench on his first competent professional team, garnering more attention for being sad about his ostracization from the team than his worthiness of actually making his way to the hardwood for it (outside of a few holdouts on Twitter whose disdain for Brett Brown and Amir Johnson outweigh their desire for teams not to score and gobble up rebounds at will).
A lot of things seem obvious in retrospect, though. In 2014, the Warriors had not yet become The Warriors; small ball was a relatively new thing, with the Heat’s successful implementation powered by LeBron James’ once in a lifetime combination of size, speed, and skill, and some viewed it as a zag ripe for the zigging. While the Sixers already had already selected two centers with high draft picks in Nerlens Noel and the Far Off Idea of Joel Embiid, Okafor was as highly rated as either of them, the presumptive number one overall selection for most of the NCAA season, with the late Flip Saunders expressing a desire to take him at that slot before working out Karl-Anthony Towns and thinking better of it. Whether Sam Hinkie picked Okafor with the intention of keeping him, swindling the Knicks President of Basketball Operations Phil Jackson and his love of fat butts, and at the insistence of ownership is likely lost to time, but the selection was at least semi-defensible at the time at face value. However, there is one image that should have warned the fanbase of the disaster this would become. It’s not this one:
Though it, too, would prove prescient. No, the image we could have gazed into like a sadistic crystal ball to see the bleak future is this one:
Everything we needed to know about Jahlil Okafor was encapsulated by this awful outfit.
Let’s begin with the most obvious part: that fucking shirt. Look at it. Look at that fucking shirt. This shirt has haunted my dreams for years, worn mockingly by passing, faceless strangers. How could anyone possibly think it’s a good idea? Here’s why: like Jahlil, it is exactly half useful, with it’s usefulness starkly contrasting from one half to the other. The bottom is a white button-down, a clean, classic look. That represents his offense, a throwback to a bygone era, still perfectly workable today. The first, most obvious problem is the other half, what appears to be a gray t-shirt starting at his midriff. The shirt ceases to be a fashionable button-down, the same way that once a defensive player has secured the rebound the Jah must have been able to procure by trying or positioning himself correctly, he stops being a basketball player, turning instead into one of those neon caution turtles that requests that people slow down but doesn’t actually do anything to make them do so outside of physically being there.
While that — the weird t-shirt part and the defense — is the most glaring issue with the shirt, though, it’s not the only one, because when you look at the button-down section, you find that it is not actually used correctly, because IT DOESN’T EVEN HAVE ANY BUTTONS. It has the appearance of a button-down without the actual functionality of one, the same way Jahlil gives the appearance of offensive competence without the actual function — his post game is inefficient (as if everyone’s post game, for the most part), and one of his strengths from Duke that would make playing through the post efficient — passing — never actually translated at all. The missing passing element is represented perfectly by those missing buttons, robbing the shirt and his game of it’s one redeeming quality.
That’s to say nothing of the blazer worn over the shirt (which may actually obscure just how bad the shirt really is, the same way his lack of playing time in recent seasons obscured to many outside observers how bad Okafor really is). The blazer foreshadowed Okafor’s Sixers career in two ways. First, it is not a good enough blazer to outweigh how bad the atrocious the shirt is, the just as Okafor’s offense is nowhere near good enough to outweigh how atrocious his defense is. Second, the sleeves are too short, representative of the way that Okafor’s physical and mental profile (his average wingspan poor instincts) hold him back from excelling despite his lack of athleticism on the defensive side of the ball. As an aside, 2016–17 Robert Covington last season would be the opposite of this jacket, his length and sense of spacing making him an elite defender despite average athleticism, and that defense making him a valuable player despite his bad shooting. 2016–17 Robert Covington’s defense was basically Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Finally, the decision to wear this jacket-shirt combo on national television was a poor decision, not only on his part but on the part of whoever was helping him prepare for the draft. This parallel is clear: not only did Okafor make poor decisions on the court — that abandonment of passing on offense and everything he did on offense — but picking him was a poor decision by the team, and served him poorly.
In the end, Okafor will probably find a place as a change-of-pace offensive bench big. It’s not what you hope for from a third pick. In the future, maybe we should put a little less predictive stock in a player’s team success at the college level, and a little more in their choice to wear a stupid fucking shirt where everyone can see them.
