Ignore all of those, for a moment.

Instead, go back to the video of the immediate aftermath of the Sixers’ decision to draft Edgecombe at No. 3 overall. Watch him standing on a stage at Barclays Center, leaning in close to a woman in white who is dabbing her eyes with a tissue. Watch him smile as a television reporter asks his mother a question, and watch him quickly recognize that she is in no position to answer.

“I’m gonna talk,” Edgecombe says lovingly as his mother struggles to process the fact that she is standing here, in Brooklyn, at the center of the basketball universe, with two boys she raised in a part of the Bahamas where the tourists don’t go. “I’m gonna talk right now. We came from nothing. We came from nothing, man. We’re truly blessed to be in this position. I know the emotions are high right now, so I’m just going to let her be right now. But we came from nothing. This is why the emotions are so high right now.”

A good apple does not a great basketball player make. But it sure doesn’t hurt when the basketball player in question combines such a tantalizing combination of present day reality and future potential.