A deep dive into where NBA MVPs come from and why it's not the United States.
ichigan and Ohio State are two of college football's most recognizable brands, built on decades of winning, iconic coaches and their uniforms. They are easily identifiable by their helmets -- not just Michigan's wings or Ohio State's scarlet stripe -- but the stickers plastered all over them as rewards accrued throughout the season.
To understand the true center, though, each birthplace had to be weighted by volume of voting points received. With the international players at the top garnering the most votes, the star power center moved toward Europe, ending up in Valladolid, Spain. NBA Hall of Famer Bob Pettit, born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, won the inaugural MVP award while playing with the St. Louis Hawks. Two players from New York, three from Pennsylvania and one each from Texas and California also garnered votes that first year.The 1960s were dominated by a pair of big men who took over the sport in different ways.
Johnson and Bird pulled the center of MVP voting toward the Midwest, even as players like Julius Erving and Moses Malone kept racking up votes -- and a few trophies.An international player got an MVP nod for the first time in 1982, when Mychal Thompson received a single voting point. It wasn't until Dominique Wilkins finished second and Hakeem Olajuwon came in fourth in 1986 that the center of star power shifted outside the United States and into the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.
From the mid-1990s through the early-2000s, a wave of international big men began moving up the MVP leaderboards. Olajuwon won his only MVP trophy in 1994 , the same season he led theto their first NBA title. Olajuwon was one of nine centers or power forwards to get MVP votes that year.
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