Why European Big Men Keep Walking Away With the NBA's Top Prize

When the Denver Nuggets used the 41st pick of the 2014 draft on a Serbian teenager named Nikola Jokic, the broadcast did not even cut to the podium. ESPN was mid-commercial for a Taco Bell Quesarito, and Jokic himself was asleep back home when his family woke him to say he had been drafted. A decade later he had three Most Valuable Player awards, a championship, and a case as the best passing big man the league has seen. The gap between that draft-night footnote and his current standing is the shortest way to explain how thoroughly European and international development has reshaped the league's biggest individual honor.

The voting record backs up the anecdote. Giannis Antetokounmpo won back-to-back MVPs in 2019 and 2020, Jokic followed with 2021 and 2022, and Joel Embiid finally broke through in 2023, giving international-born players five straight MVP trophies. Jokic added a third award in 2024, taking 79 of 99 available first-place votes, and by 2025 he had strung together five consecutive top-two finishes in the voting, a feat only two other players in league history had managed. Even in 2025, when Shai Gilgeous-Alexander interrupted the run, the ballots behind him were still stacked with international names.

Three Different Roads to the Same Trophy

What makes the run notable is that Jokic, Giannis, and Embiid did not follow the same path to get there, and none of them followed the American high school and one-and-done college route that produced most prior MVPs. Jokic came up through Mega Basket in Serbia, playing professional minutes against grown men in his mid-teens the way most European academy prospects do. Giannis grew up in the Sepolia neighborhood of Athens to Nigerian immigrant parents and played youth ball for Filathlitikos, a modest Greek club, before making the senior roster in 2011 and entering the draft two years later as a lightly scouted 15th pick. Embiid took the most unusual route of the three: raised in Yaounde, Cameroon, he played volleyball and soccer as a kid and had been on a basketball court for only a few months when former NBA player Luc Mbah a Moute spotted him at a camp back home, brought him to the United States at 16, and pointed him toward Kansas.

What the Academy System Actually Teaches

The common thread across Jokic's and Giannis's routes is exposure to structured professional systems years before American prospects typically face them. European club academies emphasize ball movement, footwork, and reading a defense inside a team system, rather than the individual highlight-driven development that dominates much of American youth basketball. Jokic's passing instincts and Giannis's positional versatility both trace back to years of playing within adult professional structures rather than against same-age competition in an AAU circuit built around exposure and college recruiting. Embiid's case sits apart because he arrived so late to the sport that his development happened almost entirely inside the American college pipeline, at Kansas, rather than a European club system, yet he still bypassed the years of early specialization that shape most American big men.

Why the Numbers Keep Trending the Same Direction

None of this is a one-off cluster of talent. FIBA-compiled voting data shows that more than 85 percent of MVP voting points since 2021 have gone to players born outside the United States, a trend too consistent to write off as coincidence. Teams and scouts have taken notice: international scouting budgets and academy partnerships have expanded across the league specifically because three of the last several MVP-caliber seasons came from players who would have been afterthoughts in an American-only recruiting pipeline.

The Roots Go Back Further Than Jokic

The current run did not start in a vacuum. Dirk Nowitzki became the first European MVP in 2007, leading Dallas to a franchise-record 67 wins and becoming just the third non-American winner ever, after Nigerian-born Hakeem Olajuwon and Canada's Steve Nash. Nowitzki's development ran through Holger Geschwindner, a physicist and former German national team captain who began coaching him in 1994 and reportedly built mathematical models of shooting arc and release angle tailored to Nowitzki's own height and arm length, a level of individualized technical coaching that had little equivalent in American youth basketball at the time. Nowitzki, along with Spanish big men Pau and Marc Gasol, spent years pushing back against a league that had dismissed skilled European forwards as soft. Jokic, Giannis, and Embiid inherited a league that had already been forced to take that argument seriously.

What It Means Going Forward

The lesson for anyone evaluating young talent is not that European basketball is inherently superior, but that early exposure to structured, competitive team basketball, whatever the flag on the jersey, produces a different and in some ways more complete skill set than a development path built around individual highlight reels. Jokic's rise from a 41st pick nobody bothered to show on television, Giannis's climb from a virtually unscouted Greek second-tier club, and Embiid's compressed few years of basketball after a childhood in volleyball all point to the same conclusion: talent identification in this sport has become a genuinely global search, and the trophy case now reflects it.

The 2025 voting made the same point from a different angle. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won the award, snapping the streak of international winners, but the players finishing directly behind him, Jokic among them, along with Luka Doncic and rookie sensation Victor Wembanyama drawing MVP-caliber praise in the same conversation, showed that the depth of the international talent pool had not thinned at all. One American winning a single year does not reverse a decade of infrastructure, scouting, and development that now runs through Serbia, Greece, Slovenia, and Cameroon as naturally as it runs through any American college gym.