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Joel Embiid was as delighted as the rest of us by Kevin Durant's burner Twitter drama

Dan Devine
Senior NBA writer
Joel Embiid, seen here showing us what irrepressible joy looks like. (Getty)
Joel Embiid, seen here showing us what irrepressible joy looks like. (Getty)

NBA fans and social media lovers the world over received a great gift last month when an odd tweet from Kevin Durant’s Twitter account responding to a fan in the third person launched a flotilla of goofs about the reigning NBA Finals Most Valuable Player deploying fake burner accounts to roast his critics. You know who else really, really enjoyed KD’s public unmasking? Noted Twitter enthusiast Joel Embiid.

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Embiid recounted how he learned about Durant’s Twitter drama, and his immediate emotional response to it, in a recent chat with GQ’s Clay Skipper:

I was actually late to that story and then I came in and I see they’re talking about Kevin Durant, and then I go on Twitter, and I see his name trending. And then I’m like, “What happened?” I’m like, “What happened? Did he get hurt?” I felt bad. Then I looked at it, and I’m like, “Oh, s***. He has a ghost account? This is about to be a field day for me.”

I don’t believe that he has a second account. I just thought he was, I don’t know, drunk. Maybe he was playing and calling himself in the third person. I thought it would be fun, and tweeted something about it. But, yeah, it was kind of weird that he has a second account.

While Embiid might not have been the first to crack a joke about the situation, he damn sure made a memorable impact when he arrived:

Embiid’s pitch-perfect joke went viral. Of course it did.

“I think 90 percent of them [will be viral],” Embiid said of his tweets. “That’s the expectation.”

And lest you doubted Embiid’s comic timing, let us applaud the young man for bringing the bit back around a month later in the midst of his recent 140-character tiff with Hassan Whiteside:

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As wonderful as Embiid’s blow-by-blow account of his delight at Durant’s #BurnerTwitter moment was, my personal favorite bit of Skipper’s interview came when the newly-maxed-out Cameroonian center described his preferred method of playing “NBA 2K”:

I know you’re a big NBA 2K guy. Do you always play as the Sixers?

Sometimes. When I play 2K, I’ll play in GM mode. And I choose different teams. But I always trade for myself because I’m unstoppable. Literally there’s no way to stop me in 2K. I average like 40 and 15, and like 8 assists, and be MVP of the year. […]

If you’re not playing with the Sixers, who are you playing with? The Cavs?

Nah, they’re too good. I gotta start with a team that sucks, like the Lakers or the Nets. I gotta make it fair.

On one hand, it is kind of amazing that Embiid considers his Philadelphia 76ers — winners of a robust 38 games over the last two years — to be in a different stratosphere than Brooklyn (41 wins in that span) and L.A. (43). On the other, only one of those three teams has legitimate playoff aspirations this season, we don’t have to look too far back for evidence of JoJo annihilating the Nets, and we already know he’s going to have a near-PatBev-level intention to make an example out of Lonzo Ball and company when they cross paths.

If he does, we’re sure he’ll never let the entire Big Baller Brand family hear the end of it on Twitter. And if they clap back, well, it might just be time for Joel to go @QuireSultan on some haters one more time.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!