Joel Embiid named NBA MVP, putting a bow on his remarkable journey

After back-to-back second place finishes, Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid has been named the NBA’s 2022-2023 Most Valuable Player, the league announced on Tuesday.

Embiid received 73 first-place votes, beating out Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic (15 first-place votes), the winner of the previous two MVP awards, as well as Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo (12 first-place votes). 

Embiid led the NBA in scoring this season with an average of 33.1 points per game on a career-best 54.8% shooting. He also pulled down 10.2 rebounds and dished out 4.2 assists per game. His Sixers won 54 games, the third-most in the league and one more than Jokic’s Nuggets. 

In February, it looked as if Jokic was on track to become the first player to win three straight MVP awards since Larry Bird from 1984 to 1986. In a straw poll of NBA reporters conducted by ESPN, he received 77 out of 100 first-place votes. 

But the Nuggets struggled down the stretch of the regular season, with a calf injury sidelining Jokic for five games over the season’s final month. Embiid, meanwhile, continued racking up 30-point, 10-rebound performances. With the Sixers winning 16 of their final 25 games, he received endorsements from players and coaches throughout the league, such as a poll of 102 players in The Athletic in which Embiid received 51 votes.

"He’s probably the MVP with what their team is doing and how he's elevated his game," Indiana Pacers head coach Rick Carlisle told reporters in March after watching Embiid score 31 points on his team in 29 minutes. "He's as difficult a guy to game plan for as there is in the game. I mean Giannis is crazy ridiculous. Jokic is, same, and this guy may be even more difficult."

Winning an MVP puts a bow on Embiid’s remarkable basketball journey. Growing up in Cameroon, Embiid hadn’t started playing basketball until his teenage years. He was a volleyball player, but fell in love with basketball while watching Kobe Bryant beat the Orlando Magic in the 2009 NBA Finals. 

"I had never seen anything like that," he once recalled. "The way they moved, and the athleticism, I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I had that moment like, ‘I just wanna do that.’" 

He was set up with some local coaches and impressed some local scouts. In 2011, he was enrolled in Basketball Without Borders, a program organized by the NBA with the intention of spreading the sport across the world. A few months later, at the age of 16, he was on a flight to Florida to enroll in Montverde Academy, home to one of the country’s top high school basketball programs. 

In 2014, he was taken by the tanking Sixers and their general manager Sam Hinkie with the third pick in the draft. An assortment of foot injuries, however, sidelined him for two seasons. Embiid also dealt with tragedy, as he learned in October 2014 that his younger brother, Arthur, had been struck by a truck in Cameroon and killed. At one point, Embiid told Sports Illustrated two years later, he considered quitting the NBA.

"I wanted to get away from all this drama," he said, "and stay away." 

Embiid made his NBA debut on Oct. 27, 2016. He scored a team-high 20-points. Sixers fans serenaded him with "trust the process" chants, an ode to Hinkie’s rebuild, and a nickname Embiid would later adopt as his own. 

A knee injury, however, limited Embiid to 31 games. It wasn’t until the 2017-2018 season that he established himself as one of the league’s premier players. He played 63 games that season, made his first All-Star Team and was named All-NBA Second Team. 

In April, in an interview with Showtime’s Rachel Nichols, he was asked what it would mean to him if he were to win this season’s MVP award. 

"I think one thing I’d say, if people tell you that they don’t care about it, they’re lying. That’s the best award you can get as a basketball player. It means a lot," he replied. "If I were to get it, it would validate all the work that I’ve put in. That’s why I care. That’s why I cared about, because you put in so much work and if you get that recognition, it just validates that you didn’t waste your time."

Consider Embiid's time not wasted.

Yaron Weitzman is an NBA writer for FOX Sports and the author of Tanking to the Top: The Philadelphia 76ers and the Most Audacious Process in the History of Professional Sports. Follow him on Twitter at @YaronWeitzman.