The night Victor Wembanyama became the best basketball player in the world
Every year in late summer or early fall, sports media outlets, including us here at CBS Sports, release their Ranking the 100 best NBA players. When the time comes before next season starts, everyone should have Victor Wembanyama at No.1.
With one of the most dominant performances in modern league history, that is, minus Wilt Chamberlain’s, in the Spurs’ thrilling double-overtime victory over the Thunder in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals on Monday, Wemby erased any reasonable doubt as to who the best player in the world is.
It’s him, as the children would say.
Victor Wembanyama leads Spurs to Game 1 win over OKC: Ranking Wemby’s five best plays from the 2OT masterpiece
Jack Maloney
Wemby’s final line looks like a failed video game: 41 points, 24 rebounds and three blocks in 49 minutes, a career high. Only two other players in history have posted a 40/20/3 line in the conference finals or later: Shaquille O’Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Filter out just the 40/20 round numbers and run Wembanyama’s actual total score, and only Wilt Chamberlain shows up.
What sets Wemby apart
I’ve always wondered what it must have been like to watch Wilt in his prime. For someone to be not only much taller than everyone else, but also more athletic and more skilled, it took a journey. That’s how he looks at Wemby at the moment. It is so uniquely dominant that it seems almost impossible to understand, let alone put into words.
To me, there is one particular stat discovered by our research department that best speaks to Wembanyama’s unprecedented dominance: With 22.2 points, 11.9 rebounds and 4.0 blocks per game so far in the playoffs, Wemby would currently be the seventh player in history (and ninth overall) to average 20/10/4 for the playoffs. The others are Hakeem Olajuwon (3x), Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Elvin Hayes, Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Parrish.
It’s a pretty impressive company, but where it really gets crazy is when you look at the three 3 points that these other six guys combined to make in these playoffs. How many 3s did Wembanyama make in these playoffs? Fifteen and counting. Including the biggest one of his life on Monday.
That’s the difference. You look at all the greatest men of all time, from Wilt to Russell to Shaq to Hakeem to Duncan to Abdul-Jabbar and on and on, and while all of them were virtually unstoppable forces inside (as Wembanyama is too), none of them had anything close to Wembanyama’s pop perimeter.
A 7-foot-4 dude walking away from the logo after his team was down three and under 30 seconds to play in overtime of a conference finals game in the first playoffs of his career, and drilling him is bananas.
…And he took it personally
It’s yet another feather in Wembanyama’s cap as the best player in the world: not just the ability to make that shot, but also the onions to make it in the first place. He’s 22 years old, making his first playoff appearance, and he already carries Kobe’s confidence with the killer instinct to match.
Wembanyama is a real team guy. You can see the way everyone is rallying around him. But he also takes it all very personally. It’s not selfish. It’s authentic. He shows his superiority in Chet Holmgren’s face every chance he gets. He openly campaigned to win the MVP award, clearly believes he should have, and wasn’t afraid to sit at the podium after Game 1 and tell everyone he wanted to make a statement after watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander receive the trophy before tipoff.
Like Vince Young eclipsing Reggie Bush in the Rose Bowl after Bush won the Heisman that Young clearly believed was his, Wembanyama came out Monday night and eclipsed SGA, the league’s back-to-back MVP, in every way imaginable.
Gilgeous-Alexander got off to a bit of a late start, but ultimately it took him 23 shots to score 24 points as Wemby forced him (and every other OKC player) to survive on a bunch of jump shots as he single-handedly closed the paint. The Spurs moved all over the court to keep Wemby stationed on the backline, releasing a shooter so he could act as a roving rim protector.
It worked. Alex Caruso had to make eight 3s just to keep OKC within range. This probably isn’t a repeatable formula for OKC’s future. Gilgeous-Alexander is going to have to take some tough jumps because the Spurs are coming down his driving lanes, and even if he manages to get through that mess, Wemby is waiting for him like a human windmill.
The Thunder need Holmgren to play big in this series, literally and figuratively, but he scored just eight points Monday and didn’t reach his first bucket until there was less than a minute left in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Wembanyama has committed to operating from the elbows rather than reducing his height advantage by settling for a group of 3, as he did early in the first round against the Trail Blazers.
When he attacks inside, he is unstoppable. We can be very sophisticated in our basketball analysis, but in this case it’s very simple: Wemby is simply bigger than everyone else. You can throw it to him like he’s playing against his little brother’s friends, and he can just turn around and put it in the basket like it’s a nerf hoop.
Wemby is ready, so are Spurs
Keep in mind that the Thunder are one of the best defensive teams you’ve ever seen, and they made mincemeat of it. On the road. In his first-ever conference finals game. At 22 years old. It’s not supposed to happen this quickly, neither for a player nor for a team. The Spurs won 34 games last year. It’s a monumental leap that’s happening before our eyes.
I guess that’s why I was alone among my colleagues at CBS predict the Spurs will win this series (I declared from the beginning that they were going to win not only the West but the whole fight), because the easy thing to say is “they are too young” or “they are not ready”.
It’s true, they are young. But nothing about them says not ready. Dylan Harper is ready. Stephon Castle is ready. But Wemby is the one. Sometimes guys are just different, and when they come along, they force you to abandon virtually all the logic you’ve acquired over years of watching the NBA. This was also a problem for Stephen Curry and the Warriors people in 2015. It was hard to believe in something you had never seen before. Until it’s too late.
It’s Wembanyama. He distorts the geometry of the court to the same degree as a young Curry, and in the time it takes everyone to even half adapt, he’s already taken over the league.
This is what happened Monday evening. The NBA has become Wembanyama’s league. We watched it in real time. You can say it was just one game, and sure enough, it’s true. But this has been happening for a while now. Wembanyama simply made it official. He is the best basketball player in the world and no one, even the one who holds the MVP trophy, can do anything about it.
