The Serbian center of the Denver Nuggets has the upper hand in the votes for the Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Cameroonian Joel Embiid
Nikola Jokic will become the NBA MVP for the second year in a row, according to ESPN journalist Adrian Wojnarowski on Monday, citing league sources. The Serbian center of Denver Nuggets has won the vote for Giannis Antetokounmpo and Cameroonian Joel Embiid, the other two big contenders to win the coveted award that honors the season’s most valuable player.
At the age of 27, Jokic has again drawn a number of astral plates. The Balkan finished the campaign averaging 27.1 points, 13.8 rebounds and 7.9 assists per game, boosting his already stratospheric number from the previous year. However, injuries to Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr., the other two big stars of the Nuggets, prevented the Colorado franchise from achieving its team goals. Buoyed by these absences, Mike Malone’s team finished sixth in the Western Conference, on a balance of 48 wins and 34 losses, and was knocked out in the first round of the playoffs by the Golden State Warriors, who tied the score 4-1. series won.
A failure that wasn’t enough to prevent Jokic, who sealed 66 double-doubles and 19 triple-doubles, from becoming the fourteenth player to tie two consecutive MVPs as a result of a campaign that saw him score more than 2,000 points. more than 1,000 rebounds and more than 500 assists, something never seen before in the best basketball league in the world.
Dominating all of the game’s records, the Joker thus takes over from Giannis Antetokounmpo, winner of the 2019 and 2020 MVP, to extend the hegemony of European players in the NBA’s most important individual recognition. He is also the first pure ‘center’ to tie two MVPs in a row since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did it in 1976 and 1977.
Quite an achievement for a child who grew up overweight and developed a privileged view of the game as a way to counteract his physical shortcomings. Off the radar of major European clubs, it was Lithuanian Arturas Karnisovas, a former Barca player and then a Denver Nuggets associate, who urged the Colorado franchise to recruit him to the 2014 draft in the final. second round, with 41st place, which turned out to be a masterstroke in the end.
Source: La Verdad
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