Philadelphia Sixers’ Cameroonian centre Joel Embiid was picked on Tuesday as the NBA’s MVP (Most Valuable Player), an award he won quite clearly over the rest of the candidates.

It is a first individual award for the Cameroonian, who obtained a French passport in the summer of 2022.

The announcement of Embiid as MVP fulfilled the prediction of his coach who in April said his standout player was the obvious pick for the coveted award.

“The MVP race is over,” Philadelphia 76ers (Sixers) coach Doc Rivers, said. He was right as on Tuesday, May 2, his pivot Joel Embiid (29) won his first MVP trophy of the season.

After two second-place finishes behind Serbian Nikola Jokic, the Cameroonian’s time finally came and he became just the second African to win the ultimate individual award of the National Basketball Association (NBA) – after Nigerian Hakeem Olajuwon in 1994.

The day before, injured Embiid watched from the bench as his team beat the Boston Celtics (119-115) in the first game of the Eastern Conference Semi-Finals. A victory that takes Philadelphia’s Sixers one step closer to qualifying for the conference finals for the first time since 2001, when they were led by Allen Iverson, the last MVP of the Pennsylvania franchise.

It’s no accident that Philadelphia has found its way back to the top thanks to the arrival of “JoJo” (one of his nicknames). The Yaoundé, Cameroon native embodies the franchise’s long-term strategy, the “Trust the Process” project launched at the dawn of the 2013-2014 season by then-GM Sam Hinkie.

In the early 2010s, the Philadelphia team was stagnating in the middle of the table: not good enough to be in the running for a title, not bad enough to miss the playoffs – and hope to be “rewarded” in the draft, where the worst good teams get first dibs on the best eligible collegiate and foreign players. Despite not being allowed per se, tanking is well-known.

But Hinkie developed this strategy of losing as many games as possible to plummet through the standings and get better “draft” picks, over a period of several consecutive years.

“They tell us every game, every day, ‘Trust the process,'” shooting guard Tony Wroten explained to ESPN in 2015.

In 2016, two years after being “drafted” third overall by Philadelphia despite a broken right foot, Embiid embraced the term “process.” “I really feel like I’m The Process, like The Process is about me,” he told Sports Illustrated. So much so he even filed “The Process” as a trademark.

For him, as for Sixers fans, the process was slow. During the first two seasons of his NBA career, the Cameroonian pivot did not play a single minute. Because of foot and back problems; but also the choice of the leadership of his franchise, which extended their method and landed him two consecutive first picks of the “draft” – in 2016 and 2017.

It was not until the fall of 2016 that Embiid first stepped onto an NBA court. Despite a limited playing time, to keep him fresh, and a short season, the Cameroonian showed great promise (20.2 points and 7.8 rebounds on average in 25 minutes). Especially for a player who had only discovered basketball eight years ago.

• Le Monde report