Someday, Victor Wembanyama will be the best basketball player in the world. He’ll put up stats you’ve never seen in ways that you’ve never imagined. Soon, he’ll set up a permanent residency atop MVP and Defensive Player of the Year ballots; the only chance someone will have to borrow one of his trophies will be if he gets injured or the voters get bored. Eventually, he’ll wrest control of the league from Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic. You will buy his shoes.
But what if someday is now and eventually is today?
Entering his second season, Wembanyama is already better than all but a handful of players. Depending on your favorite ragebait rankings, he’s somewhere between the fifth and 15th best player in the league. At the advanced age of 20, he’s blocked more shots in a single season (254) than Tim Duncan ever did (237) and made more threes (128) than Michael Jordan’s career high (111). And he did this despite starting the season slowly and playing fewer than 30 minutes per game.
Over the back nine of last season, Wembanyama graduated from a normal level of goodness to something truly nuts. In 2024, he averaged 27.9 points, 13.1 rebounds, 5.3 assists and 6.1 combined blocks and steals per 36 minutes. At this point, the only real knock on his game is that his relative True Shooting was a tick below league average, but if your immediate response to watching Wembanyama is to start talking about “relative true shooting,” does it not pain you to live a life without beauty?
Beyond the sterile realm of a Basketball Reference spreadsheet, he was a showman, turning dreary late winter games into unmissable statements. Against the Lakers, he became just the 17th player with a 5x5 game; he scored 40 points and grabbed 20 rebounds in an upset win over the Knicks. In a late season duel with Nikola Jokic, he came within two assists and a block of a quadruple double.
On defense, Wembanyama is immune to hyperbole—realistically, he could become the greatest defender ever. As a rookie, he swatted 3.6 shots per game, the most since 2016. In turn, he left psychic scar tissue on ball-handlers across the league, turning some of the most confident and competitive men alive into quivering worrywarts. It’s not merely that drivers can’t score on Wembanyama; rather, they don’t even bother. When ball handlers see him standing in their way, they go the other way. According to Vegas, he has an implied 63 percent chance to win Defensive Player of the Year; for reference, Tom Brady completed 63.8 percent of his passes as a New England Patriot.
While Wembanyama’s defense is enough to make him a Hall of Famer on its own, his offense is what could make him an all-time great. His combination of size, coordination and shooting is outrageous—to paraphrase another young mutant center, 7’4 from treball is odee shooting hang pulls.
At times, though, his offensive approach resembles that of a guy scrolling deep through UberEats because he can’t decide what to get. Wembanyama can do so many things that it’s hard for him to discern the proper course of action on any given possession. Yes, it’s amazing and spine-tingling when he chains a Shammgod to a spin move, but elite defenders can punish needless flourishes; just because you can shoot one-legged running threes doesn’t necessarily mean you should always take one-legged running threes.
Despite being able to do things that no one else can do, Wembanyama was his best when he was at his most ordinary: he ranked in the 58th percentile as a play-finisher, but just in the 28th percentile as an on-ball scorer. Even if he spent the entire summer smoking Gauloises and reading about Shallan Davar's journey to discover the Radiant city of Urithiru, he’ll inevitably become more productive alongside the newly-signed Chris Paul. If Paul can set up simple looks, Wembanyama will be spared the effort of maneuvering for more difficult ones.
It’s a cliche to say that any athlete is born for the moment, but basketball stardom is basically Wembanyama’s birthright. Since tweenhood, he’s prepared for the NBA, teaching himself English and adopting an innovative stretching routine. His story is equal parts determinism and self-determination: Wembanyama will be the best player of his generation not only because he’s the most physically freakish athlete in NBA history, but because he Wants It More.
“Some of [the top players] are really impressive and inspiring in the way they approach the game every night,” said Wembanyama when asked about the biggest surprise of his rookie year. “But others that I used to like, now it’s like I’m just not sure they deserve it. Like they don’t seem like they put as much work in as I thought.”
Liberté, égalité, Mamba Mentalité.