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.
