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.
