Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid, a six-time All-Star, has been named the NBA’s best player of the 2022-23 season, the American professional basketball league announced Monday. The player born in Yaoundé (Cameroon), who He told a few years ago that he learned to shoot a basket with a Youtube tutorial, he added 33.1 points per game and was also the top scorer for the second season, something a center had not achieved since Bob McAdoo, almost 50 years ago.
The center has surpassed fellow finalists Nikola Jokic, Serbian, and Giannis Antetokoumpo, Greek, and has won the award for the first time in his career. In the previous two, the best had been Jokic and in the previous two, Antetokoumpo. It is the fifth consecutive year that the award has not gone to an American.
Embiid is the fifth 76ers player to win league MVP, joining Wilt Chamberlain, Julius Erving, Allen Iverson and Moses Malone. The Cameroonian is the seventh non-American player named MVP since the award’s inception.
He is the first NBA player to win back-to-back scoring titles since teammate James Harden (three in a row, 2017-20) and the first 76ers player to do so since Allen Iverson (2000-02).
Embiid and Harden have led the 76ers to a 54-28 regular-season record, the team’s best since 2000-01. Philadelphia, seeded third in the 2023 NBA Playoffs, won the first game of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Celtics this week in Boston.
This season, Embiid has also had 10.2 rebounds on 54.8% shooting from the field, the best mark of his career. He is the third player in NBA history to average at least 33 points and 10 rebounds on 54% shooting from the field, along with Chamberlain (1965-66 MVP) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1971 MVP). -72).
On defense, Embiid put up 1.7 blocks (7th in the NBA) and had 1.0 steals per game. He and Defensive Player of the Year Jaren Jackson Jr. were the only two players in the league this season to average at least 1.5 blocks and 1.0 steals.
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