The NBA's international stars are taking over the league and this could be just the beginning

By Ben Morse, CNN

Updated 0602 GMT (1402 HKT) May 15, 2022

(CNN)A seven-foot man pulls up at a Serbian stable in a horse-drawn carriage. Within moments, he's in tears.

Far away from the glitz and glamor where he showcases his many skills, Nikola Jokic is being presented with the trophy given to the National Basketball Association's (NBA) Most Valuable Player (MVP) outside a horse stable in his home country. After another dominant year, Jokic was named MVP for the second straight season, in doing so becoming the 15th player in NBA history to win the MVP multiple times.As a youngster, Jokic says he never harbored dreams of even playing the sport he has come to excel at; he was too busy mucking out the stables.Jokic accepts his MVP award at a stable in Serbia. «I was cleaning the boxes. I was cleaning the horses. At that age, I was not thinking about basketball at all, I'm not going to lie.»Read MoreFast forward to 2022 and Jokic has come up smelling of roses after the 27-year-old big man became the second player in a row to win it in successive seasons after Milwaukee Bucks superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo in 2018-19 and 2019-20.Perhaps more significantly, it also continues a run of non-American winners of basketball's top individual prize and the upwards trajectory of a new crop of international stars in the NBA.Jokic dribbles against the Memphis Grizzlies at Ball Arena on January 21, 2022.A dreamBefore Antetokounmpo won his first MVP title in 2019, there had been a 12-year gap since an international player had won the prestigious award, when Germany's Dirk Nowitzki did so as a member of the Dallas Mavericks in 2006-07. As well as Nowitzki, Jokic and Antetokounmpo, the only other non-American born players to win the MVP