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Okafor taking small, quick steps

Jahlil Okafor learned it by the end of the second day, if he hadn't known it already: The 76ers will run you. They want to play fast, and they want their players to get from one end to the floor fast, and, if you're Okafor, they will want you to establish position in the post fast. So by 1 p.m. Friday, when another day of the Sixers' first summer minicamp was winding down and the pell-mell pace of practice had slowed, Okafor, like the rest of the players in camp, was dragging.

Jahlil Okafor speaks to the media after practice at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in Philadelphia, Pa. on Thursday, July 2, 2015. (MICHAEL PRONZATO / Staff Photographer)
Jahlil Okafor speaks to the media after practice at the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine in Philadelphia, Pa. on Thursday, July 2, 2015. (MICHAEL PRONZATO / Staff Photographer)Read more

Jahlil Okafor learned it by the end of the second day, if he hadn't known it already: The 76ers will run you. They want to play fast, and they want their players to get from one end to the floor fast, and, if you're Okafor, they will want you to establish position in the post fast. So by 1 p.m. Friday, when another day of the Sixers' first summer minicamp was winding down and the pell-mell pace of practice had slowed, Okafor, like the rest of the players in camp, was dragging.

For a post-practice shooting session, he hovered near the top of the key, a couple of feet inside the three-point arc, and his shooting form revealed his fatigue. He pushed the ball toward the hoop with his arms instead of flicking it with his wrists. He took several shots. He made two - banking both, and not on purpose.

After a while, though, he set up closer to the rim, and there, even tired and moving as if he were underwater, Okafor showed what the Sixers and everyone else around basketball saw from him at Duke and could see coming from him in the NBA: the balletic footwork in the lane, his touch returning, all 6-foot-11 and 270 pounds of him a smooth, synchronous machine.

"My goal is to be the best," Okafor said in an interview after he'd finished. "That's my thing I want to achieve - the best that I can be, and hopefully that's the best player in the NBA. I know it's a long way to get to that point, but that's what I want to get to."

His journey begins Monday night in Salt Lake City, when the Sixers play the San Antonio Spurs in the first of three summer-league games there, and the game will offer the first glimpse of what Okafor could become and what effect the Sixers' current environment might have on his development.

Forget that the Sixers, as a function of their rebuilding plan, would regard 25-30 victories this season as a step forward. As a surefire lottery pick in last month's draft, Okafor was always bound to end up with a terrible team. But the by-product of the Sixers' selecting him at No. 3 was a succession of questions intrinsic to their situation: How would Okafor fit both with the Sixers' desired style of play and with two other highly drafted big men - Nerlens Noel and (presumably) Joel Embiid? And given that the Sixers don't seem to have an NBA-caliber starting point guard on their roster, who in the name of Ish Smith was going to feed him the ball?

"The season, we'll have to figure that out," said Sixers assistant coach and director of player development Billy Lange, who will coach the franchise's Utah summer league team. "We have a little time, luckily. But what we have to figure out in the next few days is not that hard because I think all the players on the team know him, and he commands such a presence."

It is indeed a short-term concern - and a greater one than either of the other two. The notion that Okafor would be ill-suited for a team that aspires to dash up and down the floor and either get to the rim or shoot three-pointers is refuted by the presence and excellence of Tim Duncan. The Spurs play fast and shoot threes and in doing so won a championship last year, and Duncan - the active player after whom Okafor most closely models himself - doesn't exactly have the speed of Barry Allen.

Okafor doesn't, either. He has instead spent years poring over YouTube videos of Duncan and Hakeem Olajuwon, honing the subtleties and nuances of the kind of back-to-the-basket game that nowadays seems better preserved not on the Internet but in an ambrotype. Except it's a game that still works: Okafor averaged 17.3 points a game and shot 66 percent from the field for a national championship team.

"I don't know [that] I'm a throwback," he said. "I see Tim Duncan do it. I see Marc Gasol dominate. I see a bunch of big guys still dominating, not as many as there were back in the day. If that's the word people use, I guess so, but I'm trying to be as dominant as I can be."

What Okafor hasn't done, he said, is study any film to see how Duncan played with David Robinson or Olajuwon with Ralph Sampson. Such a research project would seem helpful, considering that Okafor, Noel, and Embiid presumably will share time at power forward and center. That Embiid attended practice Friday at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, joking with teammates, walking around the perimeter of the court without a boot on his troublesome right foot, made the question only more pertinent and, in a sense, only more ridiculous. Having too many good players . . . Sigh . . . Isn't that always the Sixers' problem?

"I'm sure we'll all mesh," Okafor said.

On Monday in Salt Lake City, we will start to see how Okafor might fit in that puzzle, what his place in this long Lazarus project might be. The Sixers will run him. They will practice fast and try to play that way, too. But he and everyone else had better remember: That will be the only fast part of this process.

@MikeSielski