“The MVP race is over. » In early April, the coach of the Philadelphia 76ers (Sixers), Doc Rivers, was right. Tuesday, May 2, his pivot, Joel Embiid (29), won his first trophy of Most Valuable Player (MVP, “best player of the season”).
After two runners-up spots, in 2021 and 2022, behind Serbian Nikola Jokic (Denver Nuggets) – a long-time favorite again this year –, the Cameroonian has become the second African to obtain the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) supreme individual distinction – after the Nigerian Hakeem Olajuwon, in 1994.
Monday, with a knee injury, Joel Embiid followed his team’s victory against the Boston Celtics (119-115) from the bench in the first game of the Eastern Conference semi-final. A success that allows Philadelphia to take an option for qualification in the conference final, a level that the Sixers have not reached since 2001. They were then guided by Allen Iverson, the last MVP of the Pennsylvania franchise.
That Philadelphia finds the heights thanks to the advent of “JoJo” (one of Embiid’s nicknames) is no coincidence. The native of Yaoundé (Cameroon) embodies the long-term strategy of the franchise, the project Trust the process (“trust the process”) launched at the dawn of the 2013-2014 season by Sam Hinkie, then general manager.
At the beginning of the 2010s, the Philadelphia team vegetated in the middle of the table: neither too good to hope for a title, nor too bad to avoid the playoffs – and hope to be “rewarded” by the “draft”, or repechage, sort of large purse for university and foreign players where the worst teams select them first. If not authorized, this tanking is then known. But Sam Hinkie develops this strategy aimed at losing as many matches as possible to tumble in the standings and get better “draft” choices, over several years in a row. “They tell us every game, every day: ‘Trust the process'”explained full-back Tony Wroten to ESPN in 2015.
Slow process
In 2016, two years after being “drafted” in third position by Philadelphia despite a broken right foot, Joel Embiid appropriated the term “process”. “I really feel like I am the process, the process revolves around me”, he then assures Sports Illustrated. At point register “The Process” as a trademark.
For him, as for Sixers fans, this process required patience. During the first two seasons of his NBA career, the pivot did not play a single minute. Due to foot and back problems; but also because of the choice of the leaders of the franchise, who extend their method and manage to win the first choice of the “draft” twice in a row – in 2016 and in 2017.
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