The holidays are here, and today I’d like to keep it light and talk hoops. Specifically, the most interesting story in basketball this year: Victor Wembanyama and the San Antonio Spurs. Here are some notes, and five questions on my mind, as I watch this story unfold in 2025 and 2026.
1. How Great Is He Right Now?
Last weekend, ESPN asked Wembanyama who is the best player in the NBA, and he said: “Jokic is the best offensive player… I don’t think he’s the best player. I think it’s between Giannis and Shai. When I come back on the court, I think it’ll be me.” I rolled my eyes. He delivered that line having played only 12 of the 24 Spurs games at that point, and after missing half of last season, as well. He’s never made the playoffs. Players with that kind of track record can’t call themselves the best player in the NBA.
And yet… Mere hours after I saw that clip, Wemby returned from injury, sat the entire first quarter of San Antonio’s Cup semifinal against the 24-1 Thunder, then finally entered the game with San Antonio down 11 at the beginning of the second quarter. Everyone knows what happened next, but I’ll repeat it here because I’m still a little bit amazed.
The first quarter showcased everything the league has been this year—OKC on its way to another 20-point win—and then the script was flipped, showing us what the NBA story might be in the near future. Wemby met one of the most dominant regular season teams of all time and made them look mortal. Offensively, he was good, settling down against OKC pressure, getting to the line 12 times, and generating all kinds of open looks for teammates (the rest of the Spurs were great as well). Defensively, he was laughably dominant, almost single-handedly short circuiting anything the Thunder tried to do inside the arc. Altogether it was a reminder that Wembanyama side-eyeing Jokic’s dominance (“best offensive player”) may be a corny look for a player who’s never won anything meaningful, but strictly as a technical matter, even if “best” is subjective, “making a bigger individual impact than any player in the league” is not far off.
Then came Tuesday and the NBA Cup Final against the Knicks, where it was Mitchell Robinson making Wembanyama look mortal. Wemby, who played that night having lost his grandmother earlier in the day, never found his rhythm offensively and had no answers as New York took control in the fourth quarter. The Knicks, and particularly the 7’1 journeyman Robinson, punished San Antonio on the glass down the stretch. Offensively, Wemby missed all four of his shots in the fourth quarter (including three missed threes). He finished his 25 minutes with the worst plus-minus on either team (-18), spawning fair questions from the viewing public:
And look, this is part of the fun! There’s no definitive answer to “how great is he right now?”; instead, there are fits and starts as he navigates the journey from preposterously talented prodigy to literal MVP candidate. Some nights all the pieces click and your mind goes to crazy places, others he’s getting justifiably clowned on Twitter. He’s somewhere between the 4th and 11th-best player in the league. The Spurs have been as successful without him this season as they have been with him. On defense, I’m pretty sure he’s the most dominant player I’ve ever seen. He covers so much ground with his length and his feet that he shrinks the court for opposing teams, taking away shots in the midrange and at the rim. He rarely fouls, and during the NBA Cup final on Tuesday, Nate Duncan noted “the Knicks are 6-17 in the paint with Victor on the floor. 12-15 when he’s off.” It’s like that every game!
Offense is more of an adventure. He’s made real progress this season and kicked his addiction to threes—last year he took 8.8 threes-per-game and 4.1 free throws, and this year those numbers are inverted (4.5 threes, 7.7 free throws). But he still struggles with physicality. His shot selection is inconsistent. He should be a play-finisher who terrorizes teams in the pick-and-roll and lives at the rim, and while he’s done more of that this year, just as often he’ll try to initiate offense on his own, stop the ball, and end up settling for contested jumpers. He’s playing much smarter offense than last year, but it’s still not clear he knows where he wants to go on that end, and how he wants to score.
So yes, “best player in the league” is still a ways off, mainly because earning that label means doing it every night — and, more importantly, in the playoffs. That’s where Jokic and Shai have been. But while we wait for Wemby to get there, watching him try to put the pieces together is the best show the league has. He’s as dominant on defense as Jokic or Steph are on offense. On the other end, the sample size of Wemby playing meaningful offense for a winning team is small enough to make every new game interesting. How much better can he get? How will he fit with capable teammates? How will he respond in the clutch? I look forward peeling that onion for the next five months.
2. Can He Stay Healthy?
One more thing on the “best player” quote. Consider the guys who have actually been in the mix to wear that crown over the last 30 years. Jordan, Duncan, Shaq, Kobe, LeBron, Steph—all of them were borderline bionic and enjoyed near-perfect health when they had a credible claim to being the best player in the NBA. The same is true for SGA and Jokic now, even as the rest of the league goes down in a heap of adductor injuries and calf strains.
Wemby is listed at 7’4, may be closer to 7’6, and the track record of players that tall staying healthy is not great. Wemby, himself, suffered a stress fracture in his hip before he came to the NBA, was mostly healthy his rookie year, missed half of last season with a scary blood clot injury, and has missed half of this season (so far) with a calf strain. I didn’t want to foreground this question and be a buzzkill, but it’s the single most important question for the future of Wembanyama, and to a lesser extent the NBA. My fear here is that humans weren’t meant to be this tall and move the way Wemby wants to, and therefore weird, seemingly inexplicable injuries will recur, and all the talk of who the Spurs should trade for, how he should play, a potential rivalry with OKC—topics I’ve loved discussing all year—will come to look like a lot of wasted energy.
The worst case scenario for basketball fans is one in which Wemby does grow into the most dominant player alive, he’s ranked atop every list, and we only get to see him play games about 60 percent of the time. The best theoretical player alive. And that scenario, if not necessarily likely, is a possibility that can’t be totally discounted until he plays a full season and full playoff run without any major hiccups. So here’s to knocking on wood.
3. Is Peak Wemby a Hero or a Villain?
It may seem crass to consider vilifying a 21 year-old kid who’s impossibly gifted, hard-working by all accounts, and unusually thoughtful and articulate (in a second language). But hear me out. He opened last year by saying of certain NBA stars, “I’m just not sure they deserve it. Like they don’t seem like they put as much work in as I thought.” Earlier this week, he explained that he plays more “correct” basketball than everyone else, in his opinion:
In modern basketball, we see a lot of brands of basketball that don’t offer much variety in dangers they propose to the opponents. Lots of isolation ball and, sometimes, kind of forced basketball. We try to propose a brand of basketball that can be described as more old school sometimes; the Spurs way as well. So it’s tactically more correct basketball, in my opinion.
Of the Knicks, he said, “They don’t play a brand of basketball as sophisticated as the Miami Heat or the Thunder.” Rather than give the people what they want (more shots at OKC’s foul-baiting), he appears to have appointed himself basketball and work ethic ombudsman. Great.
No one is saying Wemby is a bad person, but is he annoying? He’s definitely not cool. He’s lecturing people, philosophizing, performatively reading books in the locker room (and getting mocked by Jokic), and generally coming off like someone who’s very invested in seeming smart. Where Anthony Edwards exudes charm, Wemby exudes smarm. Or, put differently, Wemby is quite clearly French (derogatory).
There have been lots of questions about whether America will eventually embrace a 7’4 international star as the best player in the NBA, and how that might impact of the popularity of the league. What I have been wondering about for the past two years—Wemby interviews have been a tough hang for a while now—is whether Peak Wemby would better for the NBA’s ratings if most of America agreed that he’s annoying and began rooting for him to fail. This may sound like a counterintuitive marketing strategy, but the league was very popular when LeBron went to Miami in 2010! It’s worth considering: as the Spurs become more of a mainstay in the years to come, would the league be better off if Wemby were delivering press conferences exclusively in French (because it’s a superior language),1 and more explicitly hating on the work ethic and basketball IQ of American players? And, of course, telling his critics that win or lose, he’s going to the Côte d’Azur, and they all have to go back to their sad, fast food-filled lives.
The counter here is two-fold. First, Wemby at his absolute best is so electric that he’s closer to Steph Curry in 2016 than LeBron James in 2010. He’s hitting shots from everywhere, smothering offenses by himself on the other end, and gliding around looking like a prototype that’s never been seen before. The coolest experience in sports is when a player or a big game is preceded by crazy amounts of hype and anticipation, and then the player or game actually exceeds the hype in the moment. When Wemby’s offense clicks, that’s what happens. It’s very difficult to root against, and more aesthetically thrilling than, say, Shaq in 2001, or even LeBron at his peak.
Second, I’m not sure the NBA media ecosystem has the capacity to lean into a villain framing in the modern era. It’s been 15 years since the Decision and the resulting backlash, and lots of NBA media is still over-correcting for that environment, afraid to criticize players, and lecturing fans who do. That’s before you get to the inevitable neuroses about criticizing a foreign player, even though, to be clear, this is all in good fun and not that serious (as if the French don’t roll their eyes at Americans).
We’ll see where we end up. For now, Wemby is magnetic as a relative unknown. Once his game becomes more defined, and assuming his team becomes more dominant and inescapable, I’m very curious to see how the public responds, how Wemby himself changes, and what it all means for the league.
4. Should the Spurs Have Drafted Kon Knueppel?
Over the summer I argued on Greatest of All Talk that the Spurs should have drafted Kon Knuppel over Dylan Harper with the number two pick in June’s Draft. I thought Knueppel had a higher ceiling than people realized, Harper’s ceiling wasn’t meaningfully different, and Knueppel was a much better fit with the roster in San Antonio, and Wemby, in particular. Three months into the NBA season, that take is… still very much alive!
Knueppel went fourth in the draft, and he’s been outstanding in Charlotte, effective on and off the ball. He’s the front runner for rookie of the year. Harper, to be clear, has been nearly as impressive in San Antonio. He snakes his way to the rim with ease. He’s finishing in the paint like a player who’s been in the league for 10 years. He’s good on defense. He clearly has All-Star upside. My question with him on the Spurs—how effective can he be if he’s sharing on-ball responsibilities alongside De’Aaron Fox and Stephon Castle?—has been answered, and the early returns are encouraging. He looks comfortable on and off the ball, and he’s putting pressure on the defense in all kinds of ways. No matter what happens from here, this wasn’t an Oden-Durant situation; Harper is already good, and could be great.
I do still wonder about the roster construction. The Spurs were winning without Wemby (during his calf strain hiatus) playing a frenetic offense built around Fox, and adding Harper and Castle to that mix is a perfect fit for that kind of relentless, attacking style. Having multiple ball-handlers who can go downhill and get to the rim is a good thing, as evidenced by both teams in last year’s Finals. If the goal is optimizing Wemby’s offense, though, it would be nice to run pick-and-rolls where defenses actually have to fear the guard taking pull-up threes, as opposed to hedging onto Wemby and making his life more difficult. Or, when Wemby kicks out of double teams for the next five years, it would be nice to have Knueppel there — shooting 40.5% from 3 on 8.5 attempts per game — instead of Harper, who’s currently shooting 26% from three on 2.5 attempts per game.
It’s entirely possible that Knueppel plateaus in Charlotte over the next year or two, while Harper improves as a shooter and becomes an All-NBA sidekick throughout Wemby’s prime. Obligatory qualifiers aside, though, Knueppel has been good enough to make this a killer “what if?” that will be fun to track for the next several years, particularly if San Antonio’s halfcourt offense looks as clunky in close games as it did in the fourth quarter against the Knicks Tuesday night.
5. What’s the Ceiling in San Antonio This Year?
I love watching Harper and Castle slither around (Harper) and barrel through (Castle) NBA defenses. Those two alone have made me a Spurs fan this year, while Fox looks like an All-Star again and has raised the floor for everyone. Watching the Spurs on the right night will give you shades of the young OKC teams with Durant, Harden, Ibaka, and Westbrook (Luke Kornet is bizarro Perk here). And like that OKC team in 2010, my bet is that for all the fun over the past few weeks, this is a team that ends the year with a valiant first round loss. San Antonio is too small and too thin on the wings, and while Harrison Barnes is punching above his weight in Year 13, the returns there will likely diminish as the months pass. When it matters, Fox can only do so much, and Wemby is not ready for crunch time possessions on offense.
On the other hand, Wemby in year three is already so dominant on defense that he will level the playing field in any playoff series the Spurs enter. Also, he’s played a total of 14 games this season and only played 25 minutes in San Antonio’s loss Tuesday night. What does his offense look like with a full four months of regular season games next to Fox, Castle, and Harper? And if he gets 20-30% more comfortable by the end of the year, how might that change the equation? The most purely enjoyable phase of sports fandom is not actually the prime of a great player or a special nucleus, but that period just before their dominance is established, when expectations are minimal, and the possibilities are endless.
Spurs fans should enjoy that ride for the next few months. The rest of the basketball world will be right there with them.
What I’m Reading This Week
This is my first NBA article in more than a month, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that the proposal from my last piece, a fix for the NBA Cup and the parity era, would have ended with the Knicks getting the number one pick, the Spurs getting number five, OKC getting 10, and Orlando getting 15. This would have been a phenomenal outcome for the league, adding one more young star to Wemby’s team, putting the number one pick in New York City, and making this week’s Cup Final the biggest story in sports. Maybe next year!
As for the writing everywhere else… Vacation is approaching for most of us, so I’ve included a few more recommendations than usual this week.
- How Did the C.I.A. Lose a Nuclear Device? This was riveting. The New York Times is an easy target (as noted), but I still enjoy reading them every week, and occasionally they’ll publish this kind outstanding reporting and remind you they are the most well-resourced news organization in the world. On the other hand…
- The Turbulent Times of Friedrich Merz. It’s baffling the Times could write a 2,100 word profile of Friedrich Merz and modern Germany’s challenges and not mention China once. This Germany overview from the South China Morning Post is much better.
- How Wall Street Is Devastating Our National Security (2021). Interesting backstory amid this week’s iRobot bankruptcy, and a bit of wisdom that was transgressive in 2021 and is much less so four years later.
- When Business and Democracy Don’t Mix. A variation on the theme above, as Janan Ganesh writes for the FT, “In its proper place, which is business itself, the commercial instinct achieves miracles. When it permeates a nation’s government, and especially its foreign policy, that nation is defenceless against enemies who act out of intense belief.”
- What is Heather Cox Richardsonism? Nate Silver with a perceptive taxonomy of a certain type of liberal that has become more familiar lately (including among my actual family).
- Meta tolerates rampant ad fraud from China to safeguard billions in revenue. An infuriating story. Corporations have been selling out Americans for Chinese money for about 25 years, but rarely is it so explicit.
- Porn Is Poisoning Our Culture. A concise, harrowing read on an oft-overlooked aspect of tech’s warped impact on modern life. In brighter news, however…
- How the Phone Ban Saved High School. This is awesome, and a model for the rest of us.
- China’s Broken Bargain, in Its Citizens’ Own Words. A column that does something unfortunately rare: drawing on the experience of actual Chinese people to understand China’s economy.
- What Happened When Dr. Oz Took Charge of a Wonky Health Agency. A balanced report on Dr. Oz and the surprising success he’s had in government. Who knew!
On that note, we’re done for the next few weeks. Thanks for reading, and see you in 2026.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. We’ll publish once a week, on Fridays. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.
- Credit to GOAT listener Bryan M. for this wonderfully obnoxious suggestion. ↩︎