The voice on Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot's cell phone was frenzied, panicked.
What, exactly, was his girlfriend, Aline Muccio, telling him? Something about a truck plowing through a crowd that had gathered for a Bastille Day celebration in the town of Nice, in his homeland, France. Something about people dead and dying. Something about people running for their lives.
Luwawu-Cabarrot was in Las Vegas that day last July, preparing for a game with the 76ers' summer-league team.
Slow down, he told her.
"She was talking so fast, I couldn't know," Luwawu-Cabarrot, a rookie guard/forward, said earlier this season. "I couldn't really realize what was happening over there."
Eventually, he learned the awful truth. How a man named Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a native of Tunisia, drove a truck down the Promenade des Anglais, along Nice's coastline. How he steered the vehicle toward unsuspecting folks in the throng of some 30,000 who had gathered for a fireworks display. He covered over a mile, killing 86 and injuring 434 before police shot him dead.
The Islamic State claimed credit for the attack, and while it has been reported that Lahouaiej-Bouhlel was indeed studying Islam in the weeks before the attack, author Scott Sayare writes in the February issue of GQ magazine that there were questions about his mental state as well.
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As for Aline, she was running a little late that night, Luwawu-Cabarrot later learned, and thus was a few blocks inland. Far enough from the carnage to be safe, but close enough to see its devastating impact. To see people fleeing -- bloodied, injured, haunted.
Luwawu-Cabarrot was born in Cannes, which is the site of the famed film festival and some 40 minutes away from Nice. He knows the area well and has visited often. Even months later he couldn't fathom something of this magnitude occurring there.
"Never," he said. "Never ever. That's crazy."
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If it once seemed the world ended at the Sixers' locker-room door, that is no longer the case. A team that as recently as three years ago had no foreign-born players on its roster this season has had eight, at one time or another. (That includes Turkish forward Ersan Ilyasova and injured Brazilian center Tiago Splitter, exchanged for one another in a Feb. 22 trade with Atlanta.)
Never before have the Sixers employed so many international players; the closest they came was 2000-01 when five saw action for their Eastern Conference championship team.
"I think we've got most of the continents occupied in that locker room," coach Brett Brown said.
Besides the obvious benefit of expanding the team's talent base, it has broadened horizons. Brown, who lived in Australia for 17 years and later worked for a Spurs team that has always been at the forefront of international scouting, said he likes to talk to his players about their backgrounds and experiences, that he enjoys a locker room "where it's global and there's more going on than just looking at SportsCenter."
"It's a big world," he added, "and I like our guys being aware of it."
Everyone, meanwhile, is aware of the impact of the Sixers' foreign-born players. The group is headed by a certain Rihanna-wooing, three-shooting, Euro-stepping, Twitter-repping (and meniscus-tearing) Cameroonian center.
And if that player, Joel Embiid, is not this season's Rookie of the Year, Croatian forward Dario Saric might well be.
Australian-born Ben Simmons, the first overall pick in the 2016 draft, has been placed in bubble wrap with a broken foot, but Luwawu-Cabarrot, the 24th selection, has been starting of late. And Nik Stauskas (Canada) has been part of the wing rotation all year, while Spaniard Sergio Rodriguez is the backup point guard.
This foreign influx, while new for the Sixers, is part of a league-wide trend; a record 113 international players were on opening night rosters this season, according to the NBA's count. And at least 75 have been in the league every year since 2004-05, a result of the relentless globalization of the game over the years, highlighted by the appearance of the original Dream Team at the 1992 Olympics.
The season before that, there were 23 international players in the NBA. Immediately afterward, the number began to climb.
Yet the Sixers have only had more than two international players on their roster six times in the last 26 seasons, including this one. On four occasions they have had none. A former team official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said part of the reason for the recent uptick is the deepening talent pool overseas.
"I think there's just more good players," he said, "and I think the talent in the United States is going down a bit."
It's not that the Sixers haven't scouted internationally through the years, not a matter of them failing to do their homework. Sometimes, in fact, their dearth of foreign-born guys has been the result of behind-the-scenes power-wielding.
Take 1998, for instance, when they used the eighth overall pick on Larry Hughes, a decent (but not great) guard. Dirk Nowitzki, the German-born forward who last week passed the 30,000-point mark for his career, went ninth. Paul Pierce, another surefire Hall of Famer, went 10th.
"Do I remember the process?" the team official said with a laugh. "Unfortunately I do."
The Sixers had Pierce rated as the third-best player in the draft, while Nowitzki was "a little lower than that," according to the official. But, he added, certain team higher-ups had promised Hughes that he would be the Sixers' choice if he were still available at No. 8, and that's how it played out.
There was also 2005 when the Sixers picked Thaddeus Young at No. 12 and had three subsequent picks, Nos. 21, 30 and 38. Through a series of machinations, they wound up with center Jason Smith and forwards Derrick Byars and Herbert Hill. Smith is still in the league, with Washington, but Byars played two games in the NBA, Hill none.
Marc Gasol went 48th.
Of course, nobody knew then that Gasol, a Spaniard now in his ninth season with Memphis, would become one of the league's best centers. There were concerns about his conditioning, the team official said, concerns Gasol long ago alleviated.
Nowadays there are far fewer concerns about international players in general. The best of them are seen as more fundamentally sound than their American counterparts, and more selfless. As the ex-official put it, "Players in the states are more individual players, and players overseas are more team players."
The Sixers are beginning to take advantage. And the side benefit is that they are broadening horizons in their locker room as well.