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Philadelphia 76ers superstar Joel Embiid won his first NBA MVP award Wednesday after consecutive years of being runner-up.
Sitting in a hotel conference room ahead of facing the Boston Celtics, the Philadelphia 76ers gathered around superstar center Joel Embiid as the 2022-2023 NBA MVP was announced. For the past two NBA seasons Embiid has come up second both times in voting, being edged out by Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic.
On Wednesday, the Cameroon native who didn’t start playing basketball until the age of 15, did what he called “the improbable”.
“Probably the probability of someone like me, starting playing basketball at 15, to get the chance to be the MVP of the league is, I’d say, probably negative zero…We don’t have a lot of opportunities back in Africa in general to get to this point. But improbable doesn’t mean impossible, and you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. As long as you believe in it, and you know, keep working hard, anything can happen,” Embiid said before game two against the Celtics.
Embiid missed the first game of the second round matchup between the Sixers and the Celtics, and is a game time decision for game two with a partial tear in his knee.
The MVP award is something that Embiid called “improbable” to win, yet he still spoke it into existence almost a decade ago.
“We were just talking about the whole journey of what it took for me to be here and it just feels amazing,” Embiid said. “Being a role model and mainly to my African people, that’s the best of all, because I want us to succeed.”
The 2022-2023 NBA MVP race was the first time that Los Angeles Lakers superstar LeBron James did not receive a single MVP vote in his 20-year career. James entered the NBA when he was 18-years-old and has received at least one MVP vote each year up until now.
The 38-year-old forward however has his eyes set on a different target as the Lakers are in a second round matchup with the defending champion Golden State Warriors.
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