PHILADELPHIA — On paper, the Philadelphia 76ers have assembled the most star-studded frontcourt in modern NBA history. LeBron James arrived this summer on a minimum deal, joining forces with Joel Embiid and Jaylen Brown in what the city’s faithful have taken to calling their superteam, the one built to end Philadelphia’s championship drought once and for all.
Then the team announced it had also signed Tacko Fall.
The 7-foot-6 center, who spent the last three years playing professional basketball in China and New Zealand after his NBA career stalled with the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers, has returned to the league on an Exhibit 10 deal alongside guard Jameer Nelson Jr. and forward Saint Thomas. According to Yahoo Sports, all three players are training camp invitations, not roster guarantees — each will spend the preseason competing for a job on a squad so star-laden at the top that its actual depth chart reads like a cautionary tale about betting everything on healthy stars.
Tacko Fall, specifically, exists because Joel Embiid cannot be fully trusted to stay on the floor.
That is not a critique. It is the arithmetic of a career that has produced two MVP runner-up finishes, one All-NBA First Team selection, and 47 missed games over the last two seasons combined. Embiid has knee problems, foot problems, and a body that produces transcendent basketball when healthy and creates scheduling headaches for team trainers when it does not. The 76ers built their championship window around him anyway — correctly, because no alternative existed — and they need some assurance that if he misses time, the offense does not collapse entirely into LeBron James improvising at 41 years old.
Enter the tallest man in training camp.
Fall, now 29, played 37 career NBA games from 2019 to 2022, averaging 2.2 points and 2.4 rebounds in brief stretches of garbage time. He was never a real NBA player in the conventional sense — he was a weapon of disruption, a human wall at the rim who drew fouls and occasionally made opponents reconsider their driving lanes. In China and New Zealand, he kept his body in shape and his skills barely relevant. The question is whether any of that matters when you are 7 feet 6 and one of the few humans alive who can physically challenge Embiid in practice.
The second signing carries its own complications. Jameer Nelson Jr. — the 6-foot-2 point guard who played at George Washington, Delaware, and TCU before bouncing through Exhibit 10 deals with the San Antonio Spurs and Sacramento Kings — is the son of Jameer Nelson, the 76ers’ executive vice president of basketball operations. His father ran the offseason that landed LeBron James. His father built the roster around Embiid and Brown. And now his father’s son is competing for a training camp spot on the team his father assembled.
The Sixers did not comment on that dynamic. They did not need to.
Nelson Jr. averaged 13.5 points per game across his college career, connecting on 31.1 percent of his three-point attempts — numbers that suggest a functional fringe player who can push the pace and make an occasional shot, not a prospect who belongs in the same conversation as the men he will be running alongside. He is a name on a list, and the most notable attribute of that name is the one he shares with his father.
Saint Thomas, the third signee, arrives from the Blue Coats — Philadelphia’s G League affiliate — where the 6-foot-7 forward from USC posted 9.5 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 4.2 assists last season. Those numbers are more intriguing than Nelson Jr.’s, though the bar for a development player earning a spot on a squad that already carries LeBron James, Embiid, Brown, and Tyrese Maxey remains exceptionally difficult to clear.
The 76ers, who spent the summer engineering their championship core through a series of calculated roster moves, have now filled the edges with a returning giant, an executive’s son, and a G League forward already under contract. All three players are on Exhibit 10 deals — the lowest-commitment structure in the NBA, providing a guaranteed training camp salary with the option to convert to a two-way deal if a player earns it.
None of them are guaranteed to make the final 15-man roster. Tacko Fall might not. Jameer Nelson Jr. very likely will not. Philadelphia is not signing these players to win championships; the team is signing them to populate a training camp, identify which bodies are worth keeping, and quietly acknowledge that the margin between dynasty and disaster runs directly through the length of Joel Embiid’s availability over the next seven months.
Those answers arrive in October. Until then, the most expensive frontcourt in 76ers history has a new practice partner who stands 7 feet 6 and just got back from Auckland.
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