The story of African players in the NBA MVP conversation is one of the most quietly extraordinary threads in the modern history of American sport. For eight consecutive years, not a single player born in the United States has claimed the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award. Not LeBron James. Not Stephen Curry. Not Kevin Durant. The most celebrated individual honor in American professional basketball has not belonged to an American-born player since James Harden took it home in 2018. Eight full seasons. Eight international winners. And within that streak, African players in the NBA MVP race have not simply been present. They have been the story.
That streak matters far beyond basketball statistics. For the Nigerian families in Hyattsville, the Cameroonian community in Bowie, the Congolese households across Prince George’s County, and the broader African immigrant population that has built one of the country’s most significant diasporas right here in Maryland and Virginia, the past eight years have produced something that belongs to them just as much as it belongs to any sports analyst or television commentator.
The international MVP streak began with Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo of Nigerian descent, who won in 2019 and 2020. It continued through Denver’s Nikola Jokic of Serbia in 2021, 2022, and 2024. Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid, born in Cameroon, took the award in 2023, becoming only the second player from Africa ever to win it, joining Hakeem Olajuwon who last claimed it for Houston in 1994. Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of Canada then claimed back-to-back awards in 2025 and 2026. SGA’s second consecutive win placed him in elite company as the 14th player in league history, and just the seventh this century, to win consecutive Kia NBA MVP Awards, joining a list that includes Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Stephen Curry, LeBron James, Steve Nash, and Tim Duncan.
Three of those eight years, the trophy went to players whose roots connect directly to the African continent. A fourth player, Victor Wembanyama, whose father Félix was born in Belgium and is of Congolese origin and was a track and field athlete who competed in the high jump, long jump, and triple jump, placed third in this year’s MVP voting and won the Defensive Player of the Year award in a unanimous vote, becoming the youngest winner in NBA history and the first ever unanimous winner of the award. The African thread running through the NBA’s decade of excellence is not a footnote to the bigger story. It is the central story of the era.
The Nigerian Roots of a Greek Icon and the Cameroonian Who Made History
Read the name Giannis Antetokounmpo and the world thinks of Greece. The player himself is quick to correct that understanding. “A lot of people think my mom or my dad are from Greece, but no. Both of my parents are Black. Both of my parents are Nigerian,” he told reporters.
His father Charles was a soccer player and his mother Veronica was a high jumper in Nigeria. The two moved from Lagos to Athens in the early 1990s, leaving their firstborn son Francis in the care of his grandparents. What followed in Athens was not comfortable. The family faced the dual threats of potential deportation back to Nigeria and anti-immigrant attitudes within Greek society. Giannis and his brothers sold consumer goods such as watches and hats on the streets to help keep their family afloat. He grew up, as he would later explain, in a home where there was no Greek culture inside those walls. The culture at home was straight-up Nigerian.
His family name in the Yoruba language, Adétòkunbọ̀, translates to “the crown has returned from overseas,” according to Hall of Famer Hakeem Olajuwon himself, also Yoruba. That detail does not feel like coincidence. A Lagos family that fled poverty long enough to produce the two-time MVP who transformed what the basketball world understood was physically possible. The Nigerian roots behind two consecutive MVP awards set the template for what African players in the NBA MVP conversation would come to represent throughout this entire era.
Giannis has spoken openly about his identity: “We’re enormously proud of having this Nigerian-Greek heritage, and I loved growing up in a home where we’d listen to African music and eat Greek food.” After winning the 2021 NBA championship with Milwaukee, he traveled to Lagos for the first time in his life to document his homecoming. “I want them to understand what sacrifice my parents made in order for us to be able to do what we do, live our dream, and be in the position that we are today,” he said.
Four years after Giannis closed out his second MVP season, the Nigerian-Greek torch passed to a man who had never held a basketball until his mid-teens. Joel Embiid was born in Yaoundé, Cameroon. He hails from Cameroon and is the second player from Africa to win the league’s most prestigious honor, joining Hakeem Olajuwon. Embiid’s story became one of the defining chapters of what African players winning the NBA MVP actually looks like when examined up close. Discovered at 16 by fellow Cameroonian NBA player Luc Mbah a Moute, introduced to the game with almost no formal training, he reached the NBA draft within four years. The journey there included multiple stress fractures, a broken orbital bone, an ACL tear, a meniscus tear, and a bout with Bell’s palsy. His 2023 MVP season saw him average the league-best 33.1 points per game, 11.7 rebounds, and 4.2 assists.
Young Cameroonian players felt the weight of that moment immediately. “It’s a huge inspiration to us Cameroonian basketball players,” said James Amasoka, a 19-year-old forward in the Cameroonian national championship, shortly after the award was announced. The impact reached the DMV just as fast. The largest Cameroonian-American community in the United States exists in Maryland, particularly concentrated in Prince George’s County and Montgomery County, with Prince George’s County alone home to an estimated 8,600 Cameroonian immigrants. Those residents did not watch Embiid’s MVP from a distance. They watched it happen from inside the community they built. You can learn more about that community and why so many Cameroonians chose Maryland in our feature on why Maryland has one of the largest African populations in America.
Why African Players Keep Winning the NBA MVP and What It Means for the DMV
The question is no longer whether African players can compete at the highest level in American professional sport. The past eight years have answered that definitively. The more interesting question is why this pattern keeps producing greatness, and what the DMV African community should take from it.
Consider what Giannis, Embiid, and Wembanyama all share. All three came from families with direct African roots. All three were developed outside the American AAU basketball system that prioritizes individual highlight plays over complete player development. All three arrived in the NBA carrying something to prove that went beyond the sport itself, the hunger of someone for whom this opportunity represents far more than a career.
Wembanyama is still writing his chapter, and it reads unlike anything the game has seen before. At 22, he became the youngest winner of the Defensive Player of the Year award in NBA history and the first ever unanimous winner. The 22-year-old center swatted 3.1 shots per contest, pulled down 11.5 rebounds, and scored 25.0 points per night throughout the regular season. Through the first two rounds of the playoffs, he averaged 20.3 points, 10.7 rebounds, 2.4 assists, and 4.1 blocks per game while shooting 53.8 percent from the field. His father Félix is of Congolese origin, connecting Wembanyama directly to the same DRC community that produced Dikembe Mutombo, the Georgetown legend and four-time DPOY whose shot-blocking presence defined an entire defensive era. Two Congolese players. Both centers. Both carriers of the most feared defensive presence their respective generations produced.
Tonight, the Western Conference Finals open at Paycom Center in Oklahoma City at 8:30 PM ET, with Wembanyama and the Spurs taking on SGA and the Thunder. The Spurs finished 62-20 on the season and went 4-1 against the Thunder in the regular season, entering the series with real momentum behind them. Commissioner Adam Silver is expected at tonight’s game to formally present SGA with the MVP trophy for the third time in 12 months, following the regular season MVP last May and the NBA Finals MVP last June.
For the African diaspora in the DMV, that ceremony carries a specific emotional weight that extends well beyond sports. The DC area boasts one of the largest African immigrant populations in the United States, which led Maryland Governor Wes Moore to proclaim September African Heritage Month, a celebration that has been growing in Prince George’s County for years. According to Census Bureau data, the DC region holds the fourth-largest African population in the country, though local leaders say the real numbers are significantly undercounted. Research from the Institute for Immigration Research found that African immigrants represent 17 percent of Maryland’s entire immigrant population.
In Prince George’s County and Charles County alone, Nigerian-born immigrants make up the highest shares of foreign-born residents in the entire DC metropolitan area. Approximately 25 percent of Nigerians in the DC metro area work in service occupations and 20 percent work in healthcare practitioner and technical occupations. These are not abstract statistics. They are neighbors, coworkers, parents at school pickup, and business owners along Route 1 in College Park and on Riggs Road and Georgia Avenue. The same families the NBA has been producing MVPs from for eight consecutive years.
The narratives that tend to follow African immigrants in America minimize them. They get framed as temporary residents or supporting cast in a country they sometimes feel did not build space for them. What the NBA has demonstrated since 2019 is that the African diaspora produces excellence at the absolute highest level when given genuine room to compete. It produces MVP-caliber work in PG County emergency rooms and Montgomery County classrooms and the tech corridors of Northern Virginia. The basketball just makes it impossible to look away. Take a closer look at how African-owned businesses are reshaping the DMV economy and learn about the African immigrant healthcare workers who keep the DMV running to see that same excellence playing out across every sector of this region.
SGA broke Wilt Chamberlain’s long-standing record for most consecutive games scoring 20 or more points, extending the streak to 140 games, and became the first player since Chamberlain in the 1963-64 season to score at least 20 points in every regular-season appearance. The back-to-back MVP, Finals MVP, and now another regular season MVP in 12 months represent a level of sustained excellence that puts him in conversations alongside the greatest guards who ever played the game.
Standing across from him tonight is the Congolese-French unanimous DPOY, 22 years old, in only his third NBA season, already at a level that has produced zero useful comparisons. That series opener is the middle of this story, not the end of it.
African players kept winning the NBA MVP through every expert prediction that the American game would reclaim the award. They kept winning through skepticism and through injury and through every structural disadvantage that comes with building a basketball career on a different continent in a different system. The DMV African community built this region with the same relentless approach. Tonight, they get to watch one of their own play for a trip to the NBA Finals.
Africa built this era of basketball. The DMV gets to watch it from the front row.