Joel Embiid sat down with Rachel Nichols on the debut episode of her new Showtime series, Headliners.

The episode will be available just after midnight tonight and officially air at 10PM tomorrow night. 

We do however, have a pretty good clip from the show, where Joel Embiid talks about being the favorite to win the coveted NBA MVP award this season after finishing runner-up last season to Nikola Jokic. 

All things considered, Embiid is dominating the other top two contenders in Giannis and Jokic in the early “confirmed MVP votes” which can be viewed right here. 

Here’s what Joel Embiid had to say about what an NBA MVP Award would mean to him 

More on Embiid’s Headliners Episode via Deadline

Embiid, who was the third overall NBA draft pick in 2014, grew up in Cameroon and tells Nichols during the episode about taking up basketball as a teenager. Anecdotes about his swift rise to a spot in an NBA-run youth camp, Basketball without Borders, just three months after he picked up a ball for the first time, unfold with the nuance made possible by the show’s 30-minute run time. “We spend so much time saturated with professional athletes on our TV and on our phones and everywhere else that getting quiet time, when you can actually find out who this person is, is kind of rare amid all of the bright lights and the big motion,” Nichols said.

Embiid answered the question perfectly and to be perfectly honest with you, if he didn’t want to win the MVP award I would be furious. Every player in the NBA should want to be the league’s most valuable player. 

When did that become a bad thing? 

But of course, like with literally everything that Joel Embiid and the Philadelphia 76ers do, him wanting to win the MVP is being talked about as being bad. Oh, and the only reason he’s dominating first place votes this year is because of “voter fatigue”. 

Right.

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