Basketball Africa League (BAL) MVP Jean-Jacques Boissy, who won the 2025 title with Al Ahli Tripoli on June 14, has credited the heartbreaks that come with defeat for his mental strength during this year's season.
Apart from his silky skills, Boissy is known for his self-confidence, but it was acknowledging his shortcomings after disappointments in 2023 and 2024 which allowed him to reach his potential.
Senegalese guard Boissy burst onto the scene in 2023 - leading AS Douanes to the final, but bursting into tears in the post-match press conference after defeat to Egypt's Al Ahly. In 2024, he was less dominant after sitting out domestic matches for Douanes - an approach he came to regret as they were eliminated by eventual champions Petro de Luanda in the BAL quarter-finals.
This year, Boissy was back - visibly in the best physical condition of his career and armed with a different psychological approach to the game - which helped him on his way to the MVP crown with 18.9 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2.2 steals and 1.9 assists per game.
Boissy told ESPN: "Coming into the BAL, the first thing I told myself was to focus on each game - not the long-term vision of wanting to win the final.
"I just told myself: 'I'm going to try to win every game - I'm going to approach the game the same way and try to win the next game every time.
"[I also told myself] that [the BAL] is great exposure, so I've got to keep doing me - keep being a good person for the team, because it's a new team and really focus on winning every game.
"I think it helped me [stay calmer] and I think the energy from the team really helped me to get to that [state of mind]."
Heartbroken and frustrated after playoff defeats in 2023 and 2024, Boissy had a totally different outlook after Ahli Tripoli's only loss of the season - a seeding game defeat to Egypt's Al Ittihad.
Boissy said before the final against Petro de Luanda: "I think my favourite memory [of the season] - it's weird to say it, but it's the day we lost - because before that day, we didn't have any loss.
"We won the showcase game we played in Türkiye [and] we won six [BAL Nile Conference] games in a row, so I knew at some point in the BAL, we were going to lose one game.
"I told the team that it was a blessing to lose the classification game, so it could help us to focus on the next step and try to win the rest of the games."
Aged 25, Boissy still has faith in his audacious dream of making it to the NBA, despite having never played high school or college basketball outside Africa. However, ahead of the final, he still had yet to hear anything concrete regarding whether or not he would join fellow Senegalese former NBA Academy Africa hooper Babacar Sané, who was signed by the Minnesota Timberwolves, at the NBA Summer League.
Boissy is sure he is a better basketball player than the one who fell at the final hurdle in the BAL two years ago: "I kept working on my shot - it got better; working on controlling my emotions, being more calm and poised and thinking about what the teams need too.
"It's not every day that you're going to need to score for the team to win. Sometimes, you're going to need to sacrifice your scoring to stop a great opponent for your team to win, so I think that really changed the way I approach the game - it's just: I'm going to do whatever it takes for the team to win."