Joel Embiid, the NBA MVP who learned how to shoot threes on YouTube

“When I retire, I want to make sure they say: nobody could stop him offensively or defensively. I’d like to think I’m a freaking monster.” Joel Embiid (Cameroon, 1994) is the new most valuable player of the season in the NBA, as announced by the American professional basketball league. The Philadelphia 76ers center, a six-time All-Star, was criticized a few days ago in the The Athletic has not yet received the coveted MVP award: “I don’t make the rules, I don’t choose the criteria they use, so it’s actually about people’s preferences.” And I don’t care, but every year is something”.

The leader of the Sixers, who finished in third place in the Eastern Conference and was absent in the first game of the semifinals against the Celtics added 33.1 points per game during the regular seasonwho is the leading scorer for the second consecutive season, which a center has not achieved since Bob McAdoo in 1976.

With a height of 2.13 meters and a weight of 127 kilograms, he dominates this important statistic in the best basketball league in the world and for the first time in his career won the award for the best player ahead of the Serbian Nikola Jokić and the Greek Giannis Antetokounmpo. The African is the seventh non-American player to receive this distinction in history.

“I’ve been through a lot, I’m not just talking about basketball, but about life, because of my history, where I come from, what I needed to get here. It’s fantastic… I want people to remember that anything is possible. I started playing when I was 16 and it’s complicated. It took a lot of work and a lot of luck. Everything is possible, you have to have faith”, explained the player born in Yaoundé, who a few years ago told in an article how learned how to shoot 3-pointers from random people’s textbook on Youtube.

“I hardly knew anything about the NBA because I had never seen it in Cameroon. And I don’t think we were too poor and didn’t have television. My mother was very, very strict about school. I could never stay up and watch the games. When I got older, I became a little more rebellious and I ran away from home to play,” explained the 29-year-old player who started playing by chance at the age of 16 in the summer of 2011: Luc Mbah a Moute, a Cameroonian NBA player, organized the campus in his city to attract new talent and convince him to travel to the United States He wanted to give up at the first opportunity, as he recalled years later in a documentary about his life produced by ESPN, but he changed his mentality, improved his technique and his A few months later he signed with The Rock School, a school he led to a national championship thanks to a clear improvement in his game, and a year later he ended up at the University of Kansas, where his averages began to fall clearly at the door of the NBA.

Although physical problems have not yet allowed him to play a full regular season since arriving in Philadelphia, the player who was released by the Cleveland Cavaliers in Draft In 2014, he improved from season to season to establish himself in the elite, and in recent years he has always been in the group of regular season MVPs.

Since playing in the all-star game in 2018, the player who boasts on social media as a follower of Real Madrid has been chosen for the event every year, always as a starter. This season and the African Center he added 10.2 rebounds and hit 54.8% of his field goals, the best result in his career. He is the third player in NBA history to average at least 33 points and 10 rebounds on 54% shooting. He surpassed 50 points in three games and 40 in thirteen games. Now, after individual successes, he is focused more than ever on the team: «I am focused on that. It’s important to win, win and win, and the only way to earn respect is with an NBA ring.”