VJ Edgecombe, the NBA's most exciting rookie, has given the Sixers new life: 'Better than we could have hoped'

VJ Edgecombe really wants to dunk on somebody.

At Barclays Center after the Philadelphia 76ers blew out the Brooklyn Nets, the most exciting rookie in the NBA lamented that he'd missed a chance to throw one down over Nic Claxton. When the ball bounced off the back of the rim, Edgecombe thought "that my hands are too small and I can't finish a dunk," he said. "I need to finish the dunks, man. There will be a time I'm going to catch somebody. But tonight was not that night."

In Brooklyn, there was a buzz in the building every time the 6-foot-4, 180-pound Edgecombe hit the accelerator. He is already one of the most electrifying athletes in the league; no one who has seen him on a fast break has been surprised to learn that his mother ran track. When he soared for a slam against the Nets, announcer Noah Eagle exclaimed, "It's like he's got a trampoline at all times!"

Edgecombe "has that one-two step that he gets up really quick and really high, and it's very rare," Sixers forward Kelly Oubre said. "It looks really sweet, too. So yeah, man, just praying for his safety up in that air."

He has 14 dunks in his professional career, including the ones he threw down in the preseason, but he has yet to annihilate an opponent the way he did Gonzaga coach Mark Few's poor son Joe around this time last year.  

"We know the type of dunk that I'm hoping for," Edgecombe said.

The 20-year-old Edgecombe does not come across as particularly impressed with his own aerial exploits, nor anything else that he's done with the Sixers. Ten regular-season games in, no rookie has more points, assists or steals, and Ryan Kalkbrenner (a 7-footer who has started every game for the Hornets) is the only one who has more offensive rebounds. Edgecombe has made 40% of his catch-and-shoot 3s. He routinely guards the opposing team's best perimeter player and initiates Philadelphia's offense. He is aware that most of the world didn't see this coming so quickly, but that isn't particularly relevant to him.

"I work on my game a lot," Edgecombe said. "I work every day. I learn from people around me, and I learn from people that's not around me. That's it. I just want to become better, every day." Asked if he has become a different player than he was at the end of his lone season at Baylor, he initially said "definitely." Then he reconsidered.

"I won't say I'm a different player," he said. "Improved, definitely. I definitely got better. But that's the goal: to get better each and every day. If I hadn't gotten better since my last [college] game, then there would have been a problem."

The Sixers have been surprised in the best way. "Defensively, we thought for sure he was going to be an impact player but not one maybe right away," team president Daryl Morey said. "Some of the areas on defense were, we thought, pretty straightforward, that he would be able to adjust to the NBA. He was in college relying a little too much on his speed and athleticism in terms of getting detached from players, and we thought that'd be fairly easy to adjust." Offensively, though, "it was a little more unknown."

They wouldn't have drafted Edgecombe with the No. 3 pick if they didn't think he had star potential. It was obvious that he'd be a force in transition and "there was some optimism," Morey said, about his playmaking. "He had some on-ball reps at Baylor, although not many, that you could see. He did not get many with the Bahamas national team, but he did get some. That was a little more speculative."

Edgecombe made just 34% of his 3s in college, but they thought he had "a good base that he could improve from," Morey said. Even so, Morey does not pretend that anybody anticipated Edgecombe's season-opening explosion in Boston, in which he scored 14 points in the first quarter -- an all-time record for a debut -- and finished with 34, the most a player has scored in a debut since Wilt Chamberlain.

"We felt like it was a good pick even if it didn't hit to the highest areas," Morey said. "But he's already shown that he's materially better than what we could have hoped, I think."

At media day in September, Philadelphia coach Nick Nurse said Edgecombe's rookie season should be judged by one metric: minutes. Reminded of this five weeks later, Nurse laughed and said, "He's having a hell of a year so far." Entering that game in Brooklyn, he was averaging 40.1 minutes through five games, the second-highest mark in the entire league, trailing only his teammate Tyrese Maxey. The coaching staff needed to take a look at that, Nurse said, though it'd be easier to get the number down with a healthier roster. Edgecombe is now averaging 37.6 minutes, which ranks third in the league, but the slight drop is almost entirely because he got to rest late against the Nets.

Even now that Jared McCain is back in the lineup, the Sixers are asking a lot of Edgecombe. They are relying on him not just to play heavy minutes but to defend at an elite level, to push the pace and to make plays much more often than you'd expect for a player who, before the draft, drew comparisons to Gary Harris and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope. Save for garbage time, Nurse has made sure Edgecombe has been on the floor for every second that Maxey has sat.

Edgecombe is not complaining about his workload. The way he sees it, this is a zillion times better than sitting on the bench and wishing that the coach would call your name.

"I'm glad I'm able to play 40 minutes," Edgecombe said. "It shows that Coach trusts me. I gotta keep building that trust from Coach and from my teammates."

In the last week, Edgecombe's efficiency has dipped -- his true shooting percentage was 60.7% after the Brooklyn game and is now down to 52.3% -- but it hasn't seemed to have affected his confidence. He was having a poor shooting night in Toronto on Saturday when, with less than five minutes left in a close game, he got into the paint and scored on three consecutive possessions.

"He's the first player I've had that, at this age, has this much poise," Morey said. "He sort of plays like a guy who's been in the league for a bit, which is pretty remarkable, given it's very, very hard to be good early in the NBA."

Morey is not fond of comparing draft prospects to players who came before them. When he ran the Houston Rockets, he famously banned intraracial comps. "The combination of traits that VJ has, I think, are unique," he said. Down the road, though, he thinks Edgecombe will be "one of guys that players in the future are compared to, in that he's a little bit different."

Edgecombe "came in with a little more of a defensive reputation," Morey said, but he's now "making an impact both ways." Right after the Sixers drafted him, he got to work on his jump shot with Nurse and their coaching staff. Nurse held a shooting clinic for the team, and "all of 'em, but VJ maybe the most, took that feedback to heart and really applied it." For him, the main issue was simple: He needed to get more arc on the ball.

"I don't think that's a secret," Morey said. "I think people, including myself, watching him at Baylor and with the Bahamas national team, saw that he was sort of flat on his arc. But it's often not an easy thing to change."

For the last few months, they've tracked Edgecombe's arc, along with his makes and misses. They have seen rapid improvement. Most of the time that he and Nurse have been working together, they've been focused on "playing a little bit more of the point guard position," the coach said. He has been a quick learner in this area, too.

It's not a shock that Nurse has taken to Edgecombe. "Nick loves disruptive defenders," Morey said. "Loves guys with his attitude and approach." With Nurse emphasizing ball movement and quick decision-making on offense this season, "the basketball IQ and the skill level needs to be higher than maybe a lot of the offenses around the league." Edgecombe, who has shown an ability to put pressure on the rim and make the right reads more often than not, has fit in "very well, and a little better than we expected."

Edgecombe "can do a lot of things," Nurse said. "He can block shots, he can guard, he can knife through, he can shoot the 3." The "biggest compliment I would give him," though, is that "he just knows what's happening, knows what's going on out there. He's kind of got that, which is awesome at this age. He really has a good feel."

Philadelphia is 6-4, which might not sound all that impressive until you remember that it started last season 2-14. Edgecombe is only on the team because of the torturous, miserable slog that was the 2024-25 season. 

Last year's Sixers found themselves in "hole that we were never be able to dig out from," Morey said. And he wasn't just talking about their record. "You sort of get to, often, a virtuous or a vicious cycle in the NBA." They were hit with injuries, and then "we performed worse on the court, and then that became a little bit of a negative drag overall to mindset, and then we're playing worse on the court, and we sort of got in a vicious cycle. And I do think this year we're in a virtuous cycle of: guys are feeding off each other, the positive energy is then lifting others, which improves our play on the court, which again creates more positive energy."

These days, the locker room is a much happier place. The contrast could not have been more stark at Barclays Center, where 2023 MVP Joel Embiid sat at his corner locker playing "MLB The Show." Embiid looked up from his game when Edgecombe called his name to announce, seemingly unprompted, that Maxey, not Embiid, is his encouraging "big bro." Maxey, though, was not exempt from the tomfoolery.

"Me and Tyrese get along? We're faking it for the cameras," Edgecombe said, loud enough that his backcourt partner, seated at the neighboring locker, couldn't help but hear it. Edgecombe claimed that the two young guards, who are perhaps the fastest backcourt in NBA history, "do not like each other."

"I'm going to be honest: I do not like playing with Tyrese Maxey," he said. "Because Tyrese don't want to shoot the ball when I pass him the ball."

There is a new troll in town. Edgecombe could not, however, commit to this particular bit. "No, I'm playing, man," he said, laughing. "Overall, I love playing alongside Tyrese, man. As a lead guard, someone that just requires so much attention, someone that's so versatile."

Yes, the vastly improved atmosphere is because, early this season, the Sixers have won more games than they've lost. But it is also because, after their season from hell, they drafted an ebullient combo guard. And those two things are related. With Edgecombe in the fold, Maxey is playing the best basketball of his life in part because he's doing damage off the ball as well as on it. Edgecombe is not the only one setting him up; Quentin Grimes dished 13 assists against the Nets. 

"The more guys that can handle the ball, the better," Maxey said. "A lot of guys can playmake, a lot of guys can play off each other. That's the biggest thing that we need."

There remains uncertainty about Embiid, Paul George and Philadelphia's short-term ceiling. Edgecombe, however, has helped put the team on solid ground. "There will be bumps in the road, but he sure seems like someone who is well equipped to overcome them," Morey said. And while Edgecombe has a long way to go, he seems like much more of a sure thing than he did a few months ago.

"What's exciting is, generally, when players make an impact at 20, that that tends to set you on a pretty favorable path for your NBA journey," Morey said.

Edgecombe is the vibes guy keeping things light in the locker room and the energy guy diving for loose balls. He also may be a franchise-changer. And when talking about the place he landed up, he got serious.

"I always thought that [Philadelphia] would be a good fit for me, from entering the whole pre-draft process" Edgecombe said. "Despite, as a top pick, you would think [I'd want] to come in there and be the man. But fortunately, that's not the case here, to be honest, because we're a winning program, I'm around guys that want to win, I'm around superstars. And I'm just here to be myself."