It could be a breakout night for the Kansas men’s basketball program — if one of its past stars ends up having one of the biggest nights of his career.
If former KU big man and current Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid hears his name called when the NBA announces its Most Valuable Player Award tonight, Kansas will become just the fourth college basketball program to have produced multiple winners of the NBA MVP award.
You have to go back a bit to find the last one, but he is hard to miss. Wilt Chamberlain won the award four times in his historic NBA career, with the last coming in 1968.
Embiid is one of three finalists for this year’s award, which will be announced at 6 p.m. tonight on TNT. Embiid, who played at KU in the 2013-2014 season, is one of three finalists for the NBA’s top individual award. He’s up against Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets and Giannis Antetokounmpo of the Milwaukee Bucks. Jokic has won the MVP the last two seasons, and Antetokounmpo won it the two seasons before that.
Embiid has been the runner up for the award the past two seasons. Embiid failed to win the MVP last year despite being the league’s scoring champion with 30.6 points per game in the 2021-22 season. This season, he won the scoring championship again with a 33.1 points per game average. That would be the highest scoring average for an MVP since 1988 when Michale Jordan averaged 35 points per game en route to an MVP season with the Chicago Bulls.
Jordan hails from one of the three college programs that have produced multiple NBA MVP award winners. Jordan and 1975 MVP Bob McAdoo both attended the University of North Carolina. Louisiana State University also has two NBA MVPs, Shaquille O’Neal and Bob Pettit, who was the inaugural winner of the award in 1956.
UCLA tops the list with three MVPs — six-time winner Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton and Russell Westbrook, who won the top honor in 2017.
NBA prognosticators have been split on who will win this year’s award, but Embiid brings a strong stat line into the contest. Embiid averaged 33.1 points, 10.2 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.7 blocks per game during the regular season. His 76ers are the third seat in the Eastern Conference playoffs.
Jokic, on the top seeded team in the Western Conference, is well behind Embiid in scoring, checking in with 24.5 points per game, but he has posted better numbers in rebounds (11.8) and nearly averaged a triple double with his assist average coming in at 9.8 per game.
Antetokounmpo put 31.1 points per game, 11.8 rebounds and 5.7 assists. His Bucks were the top-seeded team in the Eastern Conference but were upset in the first round of the playoffs.
