The seeds were planted long ago, but we’re finally seeing the full fruits of ex-NBA commissioner David Stern’s labor. The league presents more of a global game than ever, and that fact has now spilled out onto the court in the coolest possible way.
On Wednesday night, after Denver Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokic won his third MVP award in four seasons, there was a lot of thoughtful reflection about what his latest achievement meant. But beyond the extremely exclusive club that Jokic is now a part of, his newest MVP win is so much bigger than him. Why? The Serbian is a non-American player who is helping to establish a bona fide international dominance alongside some of the finest talents in the league.
Jokic’s third MVP continues the longest streak (six years) of non-American players to win the prestigious award in league history. This is the reality that Jokic (2021, 2022, 2024), the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid (2023), and the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo (2019, 2020) have given us.
And that is … just wild to think about:
2019-24: six consecutive foreign-born NBA MVP winners
2008-18: 11 consecutive USA-born MVPs
2002-07: five out of six foreign-born MVPs
1956-2001: only one foreign-born MVP
— Adi Joseph (@AdiJoseph) May 8, 2024
Sure, there were plenty of standout international players around the league over the last 40 years. You had your Hakeem Olajuwon’s, Dirk Nowitzki’s, and Pau Gasol’s as stars. And there were, of course, other countless standout difference-makers and role players whose impact can’t be forgotten.
But before the last six years, I don’t think there’s ever been as clear-cut of a case that most of the top players in the premier men’s basketball league on this blue marble in space aren’t, in fact, American.
Seriously. Let’s think about this.
If I ranked the current best players in the NBA, it would probably go like this, and it’d actually take a little while before we got to someone from the United States!
- Nikola Jokic (Serbia)
- Joel Embiid (Cameroon)
- Luka Doncic (Slovenia)
- Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada)
- Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece)
- Jayson Tatum (United States)
Dearest readers, the first five players on that list are a First-Team All-NBA-caliber group in any average year. And only one of them (Embiid) is in their 30s. There’s still so much great basketball to be played among them.
This is all a fantastic development for the NBA, which continues to expand its reach worldwide. I can’t help but think about children elsewhere in the world staying up to watch stars like Jokic, Embiid, and Antetokounmpo dominate at the top of the sport and wondering, “Hey, that could be me one day!” That in itself is planting another seed. It is the game growing naturally, with kids potentially getting awesome new role models who paved the way to their hopeful dreams.
To be clear, at this point in time, most of the best players in the league after the tippy-top still come from the United States. It’s not all that close, either.
But this is still a dramatic shift from where the league even was in the early aughts. When I see stats like this about recent MVP winners all being from elsewhere in the world, it makes me so excited for the future, decades from now, when the world will have potentially really caught up to the U.S., and we will see more players from other walks of life rising to well-earned NBA superstardom.
Then we’ll really have a global game.