When Victor Wembanyama came into the NBA as the No. 1 pick in 2023, the hype, quite literally, couldn't have been any bigger. Wait, you're telling me there's a 19-year-old kid in France who makes seven-footers look small with the skills of a guard? You can imagine the "OK, buddy" snickers, because honestly, if you weren't tapping into the EuroLeague circuit, the idea of this guy sounded inconceivable.
Some freakish combination of Kevin Durant and Bill Russell? What are you going to tell me next, that in his third NBA season, he's going to become the first unanimous Defensive Player of the Year in league history, finish third in MVP voting and go to the Finals, where his team will hold the lead for more than 70% of the total minutes played, by way of a Game 7 road win over the defending champion Thunder? As it turns out, that's precisely what Wembanyama accomplished last season despite not being old enough to legally buy a beer until the month before the All-Star break.
His learning curve looks like the vapor trail of a rocket ship headed straight for the moon. Not since LeBron James, who averaged an astonishing 31 points, seven rebounds and six assists in his third NBA season, has a player been this dominant this soon. When LeBron carried the 2007 Cavaliers to the Finals, he was 23 days younger than Wemby was when he made his Finals debut on June 3 against New York.
LeBron is arguably the greatest player in NBA history, which is probably the only career outcome that could have actually exceeded the teenage expectations with which he was saddled. It's close to the same for Wembanyama, who is already on a GOAT trajectory. Everyone knows you're supposed to wait until a player has won at least one championship and/or MVP, or hell, at least until he's actually through his rookie contract, before you even start whispering things like that, but Wembanyama is leaving us no choice.
He's the best defensive player on the planet to the degree that Stephen Curry is the best shooter on the planet. Just about everything else in basketball is debatable. Those two things are not.
Both Curry and Wembanyama warp the geometry of a court in ways nobody could have imagined before they came along. Curry stretches defenses. Wembanyama shrinks offenses.
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