Every year, sometime in late summer or early fall, sports outlets publish their top 100 NBA player rankings. When the time comes prior to the start of next season, everyone should have Victor Wembanyama at No. 1.
With one of the most dominant performances in modern league history in the Spurs' thrilling double-overtime win over the Thunder in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals on Monday, Wemby erased all reasonable doubt as to who is the world's best player.
He's him, as the kids would say.
The Performance
Wemby's final line looks like something out of a glitched video game: 41 points, 24 rebounds and three blocks in a career-high 49 minutes.
Only two other players in history have authored a 40/20/3 line in the conference finals or later: Shaquille O'Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Filter not just for the 40/20 round numbers and run Wembanyama's actual total box score, and only Wilt Chamberlain comes up.
What Sets Wemby Apart
I've always wondered how it must've looked watching Wilt in his prime. For someone to be not only that much bigger than everyone else, but more athletic and skilled, too, had to have been a trip. That's how it is watching Wemby right now. He is so uniquely dominant, it feels nearly impossible to wrap your head around, let alone actually put into words.
For me, there is one particular stat that speaks best to Wembanyama's unprecedented package of dominance: At 22.2 points, 11.9 rebounds and 4.0 blocks per game so far in the postseason, Wemby would currently be the seventh player in history to average 20/10/4 for a postseason.
The others are Hakeem Olajuwon (3x), Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Elvin Hayes, Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Parrish.
That's impressive enough company, but where it gets really wild is when you look at the three 3-pointers those other six guys combined to make in those postseasons. How many 3s has Wembanyama hit in these playoffs? Fifteen and counting.
That's the difference. You look at all the greatest big men to ever play, from Wilt to Russell to Shaq, Hakeem, Duncan, Abdul-Jabbar and on down the list, and while all of them were virtually unstoppable forces inside, none of them had anything close to Wembanyama's perimeter pop.
The Big Shot
A 7-foot-4 dude pulling up from the logo with his team down three and under 30 seconds to play in overtime of a conference finals game in the first postseason of his career, and drill it, is bananas.
The Mindset
That is yet another feather in Wembanyama's best-player-in-the-world cap: Not just the ability to make that shot, but the confidence to take it in the first place.
He is 22 years old, in his first playoff run, and he's already carrying around prime Kobe confidence with the killer instinct to go with it.
Wembanyama is such a team guy. You can see the way everyone rallies around him. But he also takes all of this extremely personally. It's not selfish. It's authentic.
He openly campaigned to win the MVP, clearly believes he should have, and wasn't afraid to sit up at the podium following Game 1 and tell everyone he was out to make a statement after watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander be handed the trophy before tipoff.
Like Vince Young upstaging Reggie Bush in the Rose Bowl after Bush won the Heisman that Young clearly believed belonged to him, Wembanyama went out on Monday night and dwarfed SGA, the back-to-back league MVP, in every imaginable way.
Gilgeous-Alexander needed 23 shots to score 24 points as Wemby forced him and all the other OKC players to survive on a bunch of jump shots as he basically single-handedly locked down the paint.