We are coming to the end of the NBA regular season, and the MVP race is all but over. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will almost certainly win his second MVP in two years. Sure, the Alien from France could catch him, but if we are being honest, this is Shai’s award to lose.
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But a quick question: Will a Black man born in the country that invented this game win this award again?
For the better part of two decades, the NBA’s MVP race felt familiar. Oftentimes a Black American superstar would dominate, collect the trophy, and we would argue about where he ranked over all time. That is what we did with Steph, KD, and LeBron.
Lately, that script has flipped. The award has become an international one.
The last American-born Black man to be named Most Valuable Player in the NBA was James Harden. The year? 2018. Let me do the math for you. There has not been a Black American winner of the MVP in eight years.
The winners since then have been Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, Nikola Jokić, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. In other words, they are all from another country. It is a quiet but striking shift for a league long defined by American stars.
You are asking the wrong question if you’re wondering where all the Black American players have gone. (They’re still around.) The question is why we are not winning MVPs, and the answer is staring us in the face.
The award is no longer going to the most dominant scorer or the most electric player. It is going to the most efficient one. The one who fills every column, controls every possession and does it without wasting movement. Right now, that profile just does not look like the players we are used to seeing win it.
OK. Pause. There is no way for me to explain why this is happening without getting mad nerdy. Stay with me, I’m going somewhere.
For example, look at Nikola Jokić. He has a Player Efficiency Rating (PER) over 31, a stat that captures total per-minute production. And his True Shooting percentage sits near 65%, measuring scoring efficiency across twos, threes, and free throws. Put that next to Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest players of all time. Kobe’s PER never got close to 30, and his efficiency was in the mid-50s, well below Joker’s.
Kobe is revered. He was dominant. But he was not efficient. In today’s NBA, I doubt he would win the award. That is the shift.
If you want to understand why foreign-born players are more efficient, you have to start with how they are developed. Many international systems emphasize spacing, passing, and decision-making from a young age, not just scoring. Players are taught to read the game, move without the ball, and value every possession. That leads to better shot selection, more assists, and fewer wasted dribbles. By the time players like Shai Gilgeous-Alexander arrive, they are not just talented, they are optimized for the kind of efficiency the modern NBA rewards.
American-born players tend to come up through AAU basketball. That system often prioritizes exposure, scoring, and highlight plays, not the same level of structure or discipline found in other countries. That difference in development shows up later, when efficiency becomes the standard.
So no, Black American players did not disappear. They just got passed. Not in talent, not in skill, but in approach.
The rest of the world studied the game while we performed it. Now the award reflects that difference. If we want MVPs back, we must decide what we value more: looking like the best player in the gym, or actually being the most effective one.
Straight From 
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