[Hollinger] to ask execs from the other 29 teams if they thought Wemby had supplanted Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić as the league’s best player. Mostly, I was met with chortles and nods.. is Wemby the best player in the league? “No,” another veteran exec said. “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.”
There will be no relitigating the NBA MVP award.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander won his second straight trophy on Sunday, deservedly, with Nikola Jokić and Victor Wembanyama finishing as runners-up. Regardless of what happens in the Western Conference finals between Gilgeous-Alexander’s Oklahoma City Thunder and Wembanyama’s San Antonio Spurs, that was the correct result.
Here’s the thing, though: At age 27, Gilgeous-Alexander is in the prime of his career. With the league’s best record, a championship ring in 2025 and another MVP trophy, you’d think it was indisputable that he’s far and away the NBA’s best player.
And yet … will his next series mark a changing of the guard?
Gilgeous-Alexander was the league’s best player over the course of the 82-game regular season, but is he the best player right now? That part seems in serious question after Wembanyama came on like gangbusters in the second part of the campaign and has thus far dominated the playoffs.
I’m not sure this aspect of the storyline has received quite the attention it deserves: Wembanyama was a really good player for the first three months … and then completely went nuclear during the stretch run.
From Feb. 1 to the end of the season, the Spurs went 28-2 when Wembanyama played and posted a plus-23.4 net rating, the best mark in the league by a wide margin (the next three players on the list all played for the Thunder, including Gilgeous-Alexander). In that same stretch, the Spurs were just plus-0.7 with Wemby off the court, a 22.7-points-per-100-possessions difference that would make even longtime Denver Nuggets fans raise a surprised eyebrow.
That’s carried over into the playoffs, as the Spurs are 7-1 when Wembanyama plays at least 15 minutes and 1-2 when he doesn’t; San Antonio has a plus-21.9 net rating in his minutes but just plus-7.1 when he sits.
Individually in that post-February stretch, Wembanyama raised his rates of points, rebounds, assists and true shooting sharply from the first half of the year, despite a slump from the 3-point line that prevented his numbers from really going ballistic. Of his 13 games with a game score above 30, 10 came after Feb. 1, including the top four. Wembanyama’s back-to-back 41-point masterpieces on March 30 and April 1 were his two highest-rated, despite only playing 29 and 30 minutes in the two games.
I’ll note that this wasn’t just a hot shooting stretch; those numbers came with a big jump in his already fearsome block rate and were emphatically backed up by the eye test.
The league’s scariest talent is still getting better. Rapidly.
To make sure I wasn’t alone in this assessment, one of my missions at the NBA Draft Combine was to ask execs from the other 29 teams if they thought Wemby had supplanted Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokić as the league’s best player. Mostly, I was met with chortles and nods.
“I don’t know what the hell you do with him,” said one personnel expert. “Offense. Defense. Any of it.”
So … is Wemby the best player in the league?
“No,” another veteran exec said. “He’s the best player I’ve ever seen.”
During Game 6 of the Spurs’ series against Minnesota, Prime Video analyst and longtime NBA head coach Stan Van Gundy mentioned to a national audience that, “Victor Wembanyama is the most impactful defensive player I have ever seen in this league.” After the game, Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels, no defensive slouch himself, echoed Van Gundy.
“Wemby is probably the greatest defender I ever played against,” McDaniels said. “Him being so tall and so long, it was hard to get to the rim. … I was able to get to my spots, but playing Wemby, he’s huge. He’s so tall. He’s the greatest defender I ever played against.”
That’s to say nothing of the offensive highlights he almost nonchalantly generates between his endless length, his guard-like skill level and his advancing feel for the game.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7286884/2026/05/18/sga-nba-mvp-wemby-best-player/