Can Wemby make the MVP leap?

The NBA's resident alien just had the coolest summer possible. Can he follow it up with a season for the ages?

Photo by Katelyn Mulcahy/Getty Images

This is the Silver Bulletin solo byline debut for Joseph George, our Assistant Sports Analyst. As I hope you can see from this story, Joseph brings a unique blend of scouting/film study and advanced analytics to his NBA analysis. It’s also the informal launch of our NBA coverage for the season. We don’t have an official season preview planned, but you can check out our long-term rankings on which teams have the brightest futures. We’re super excited about the season. And we hope to begin work on RAPTOR 2.0 once our NFL modeling work is fully ready to go.

One more small detail: the photo of Wemby you see above is from Getty Images, a provider of editorial and stock photography. We’re now paying for their services as part of our continual effort to professionalize and upgrade our operations. Silver Bulletin is still in a “slow growth” phase, and that feels very comfortable for us; we’re not looking to conquer the world or pay for fancy office space somewhere. But we are reinvesting in the business, and we’re deeply appreciative for subscribers who help make that possible. —Nate Silver

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If you prefer to ignore the Steve Ballmer-Kawhi Leonard tree company fiasco¹, the NBA has been quiet since the Kevin Durant trade. This has been good for us over here at Silver Bulletin — we’ve been knee-deep in work on our NFL models, QBERT and ELWAY — but bad for the NBA news ecosystem.

The most interesting player to follow through this gray period has been Victor Wembanyama, who, in a single summer, became a Shaolin monk, met Snoop Dogg and Daniel Radcliffe, and trained with Aaron Donald, Kevin Garnett, and Hakeem Olajuwon. And then in the Spurs’ preseason debut on Monday, Wemby nearly tallied a triple-double in 16 minutes, admittedly against the Guangzhou Loong Lions.

I, for one, am quite jealous: Wemby is a whole year younger than me, and while I was doing a summer internship, he was getting barked at by KG and casting spells with Harry Potter. But I digress.

I bring up Victor because, despite his phenomenal play, he hasn’t yet been the personality that casual NBA fans tend to flock towards. He’s a bit Kareem-esque: calm, stoic, and while not exactly aloof, certainly not interested in appealing to the masses.

But for what it’s worth, prediction markets are warming up on Victor’s chances for an MVP this season. While I think 11.7 percent is an okay bet — Polymarket had it at 4.4 percent when I originally wrote this, which would have provided a much better value — that figure is skewed by the constraints of the MVP award as a whole. It’s more likely the Spurs miss the playoffs than make the Finals next season — but how much of that is a reflection on his talent rather than the weird limbo the Spurs are in?

Wemby walked into the league a defensive juggernaut

When discussing Wemby, the first place to start is obviously his defense. By my estimation, he’s the best player on that side of the floor in the NBA right now. It’s easy to point to his blocks — the gargantuan numbers he puts up in that category are a massive outlier:

Blocks, however, are a weird stat to evaluate in a vacuum. A large percentage of blocks don’t change possession: a study from the 2003-04 season found only 57 percent were recovered by the defense. The biggest issue with blocks, though, is that they can create poor incentives for players. For example, a player out of position can be rewarded with a box score boost even if at his own team’s detriment. (Hassan Whiteside was a frequent culprit of this, for example.)

Nate’s work for RAPTOR 1.0 didn’t put much emphasis on blocks, treating them as subordinate to overall rim protection, and we’d be surprised if the new version we’re working on is much different. Instead, it’s generally accepted nowadays that deterrence — preventing efficient shots from being taken in the first place — is a better indicator of a good defender. In a more spaced-out game, this concept becomes especially important. Todd Whitehead’s (@CrumpledJumper) mostly-in-jest stat from the 2023-24 season, HELLNAH² tries to quantify this. When a player plays out of position, he might get a block, but is that really indicative of smart defense? Or is it a reckless gamble? A decent signal of this is seeing how much rim and corner three attempts go down when a player is on the floor:

The best rim protectors stifle both corner three and rim attempts — the two most efficient shots in the game — and as you can see from his presence in the happy green quadrant, Wemby is among the league leaders in both.

Almost everyone already knows Wemby is a stellar defender, though. There’s far more debate about his offensive production, and that’s where he’ll need to improve to compete for the MVP against the NBA’s inevitable forces.

Wemby is creative but unpolished

The most valid critiques of Wembanyama’s ability as a creator thus far have centered around his turnovers. He’s a bold passer — much better than any of us geeks had assessed during his draft cycle — but that creativity can sometimes go a little too far:

It’s important to note that in this chart, I’ve used bad pass turnovers specifically — and not just generalized turnovers, which can include having the ball stolen off a live dribble, shot clock violations, travels, and double dribbles. Regular assist-to-turnover ratio can be an okay indicator of passing efficiency but assist-to-bad-pass ratio is simply a much more direct measure of passing skill. It’s not uncommon for young players to be turnover-prone, but if Victor is going to produce at an MVP level, he’ll have to either fix his tendency to force those weaker passes or learn counters against defenses that are daring him to open up his playbook.

Still, we’d bet on improvement here; it’s hard to overstate how steep the learning curve is for a player in his first 100-200 NBA games (Wemby has 117 in his career). Merely being average is a favorable indicator for such a young player, and he’s been much better than that. Maybe people were asking the wrong questions about Wemby in his pre-draft process. The most common critiques were of his frame and how it would hold up in “high-pressure situations” (i.e., against post-ups and double teams). But, perhaps we were ignoring a few of the natural advantages to being so tall and lanky.

Attention magnets do well in the modern era

We know Victor can straight-up see over his opponents, and paired with his shooting and movement, that should open up a number of interesting cutting opportunities for his teammates. For instance, take this clip from his duel with Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets this past season:

There are a number of crazy things that happen in this possession. It’s not just that Wemby decides to fake an absolutely bonkers three-pointer near the logo. But, in order to understand this, we need to find a good framework to analyze the film.

The three-point revolution has given us a lot of great basketball. Some may disagree, but I think it’s produced a more sophisticated form of the game. Most importantly, I believe the greatest gift of the spacing era has been reframing offensive player value not just in terms of points or assists, but in terms of the attention players command.

For instance, take a look at this anachronistically grainy footage of a Warriors play in Game 2 of the 2019 Finals against the Raptors:

We can see Steph curl around Kevon Looney’s screen, and even though Fred VanVleet gets there, it’s not convincing enough for Kawhi, who lingers for an extra few seconds instead of recognizing Draymond Green’s cut. Against a worse pull-up shooter³, Kawhi might not need to play up. But knowing Curry can get that shot up with decent efficiency, or even take FVV off the dribble, the entire defense breaks down.

In this case, Curry gets credited with an assist and Draymond gets his two points — and that’s fine, because both players made the right play — but fundamentally, the box score isn’t an apt measure of just how high a floor this phenomenon provides for an offense. It also highlights that raw shooting percentages aren’t the only way to measure efficiency — the difficulty distribution of a player’s shot diet matters just as much. For example, Steph Curry’s ability to hit movement threes is far more valuable than P.J. Tucker being an elite catch-and-shoot threat. Even if both shoot 40 percent from three on the same volume, Curry generates advantages because of the attention he draws — this is what we call gravity — while the Tucker types capitalize on their work.

Now, let’s go back to our original play with Wemby. He draws particular attention from the Nuggets because he can shoot from deep, but only a few of their players can meaningfully bother his jump shot at its apex. The Nuggets scramble, even though only Michael Porter Jr. can really affect the shot, and Victor’s teammates recognize that.

Pure shooters are the easiest way to demonstrate this concept, but if you’re hypothesizing that it also applies to other player archetypes, you’d be correct. In the simplest case — a good isolation player beating his defender one-on-one to the point where he draws a double-team — we can also see the effect of gravity:

In this play, which happens right before the other one we analyzed, Wemby starts at the elbow and CP3 comes over to draw a defender switch. In this case, Jokic neither has the length, vertical or speed to bother Victor, and ultimately, Christian Braun has to try and force the ball out of his hands. Jokic doesn’t know who his assignment is anymore and Justin Champagnie relocates to the corner and knocks it down. In this case, Wemby was neither the assister or scorer, but still had the largest influence on the play.

If two players set equally solid screens, their impact can differ. A lob threat, for instance, forces the defense to stay attached, opening driving lanes for the ball-handler. A screener without that threat won’t bend the defense in the same way, and the result is fewer high-quality looks for teammates.

There have been a number of attempts to quantify this phenomenon, and all of them start with the idea that every player exhibits some level of pull, depending on where they are on the floor. We can try to measure this empirically through the placement of defenders in relation to the ball handler and the off-ball player, or by the consistency with which a player is doubled on the ball.

However, the public isn’t given access to full coordinate tracking data, and building a computer vision model to get these details precisely is a super arduous task much better suited for a full scale research team. That’s not to take the wind out of your sails, especially if this framework excites you. The lack of premium tracking data hasn’t stopped analytics geeks from figuring out some interesting solutions to most problems, and this is no exception.

An advanced stat detour can help us figure out Victor’s value

I want to highlight one approach in particular — not just because I admire its elegance — but because it’s aligned with an interesting trend in analytics circles. Krishna Narsu and the BBall Index team have tried an RAPM approach towards shot quality influence.

For context, RAPM (Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus) is a regression-based model that estimates a player’s impact on team performance by controlling for the other players on the floor. A technique known as ridge regression is used so that low-minute samples aren’t treated with too much significance. Ultimately, RAPM is a way to extract hidden value by ignoring the box score and focusing on an offense’s overall productivity.

RAPM is not at all a recent development in the basketball world — its predecessor, APM, has been around for at least 20 years now — but it’s still somewhat obfuscated from casual fans of the sport. Some of the baseline criticisms of RAPM lie in it “not giving enough context”. This would be a decent critique if we took its results at face value and never bothered with adjustments, but as these approaches have evolved, opponent styles and strengths, teammate roles, and spacing have been factored in. The RAPM approach can be adjusted to understand a number of interesting things about a player, like how much they affect the four factors.

BBall Index, for instance, has adjusted the original RAPM model to isolate off-ball value with the following design:

\( \text{ShotQuality} \sim \text{Shooter} + \text{OFF}_1 + \text{OFF}_2 + \text{OFF}_3 + \text{OFF}_4 + \text{DEF}_1 + \text{DEF}_2 + \text{DEF}_3 + \text{DEF}_4 + \text{DEF}_5 \)

The key distinction is the target variable being Second Spectrum’s Shot Quality metric and tagging one offensive player with a “shooter” designation. By doing this, they can better identify off-ball value.

So, while RAPM-ification (coined by myself) hasn’t yet hit the mainstream for the average fan, I envision it as the backbone of our understanding of value. It seems poised to become an even bigger deal in the future, especially with the success of RAPM-based models like EPM and RAPTOR.

Just by glancing at the results, it’s clear that while Victor doesn’t have a Jokic–level impact on his teammates, no other “big” does either, and he already belongs firmly in the “solid impact” group. This season should bring even more improvement, especially with the addition of the speedy De’Aaron Fox and herky-jerky Dylan Harper, along with some progression from decent cutters Stephon Castle and Jeremy Sochan.

Wemby has been an … experimental NBA player

Still though, given that Victor warps the geometry of the court with his mere presence — he walked into the NBA as the greatest lob threat ever — it’s hard not to view his teammate shot quality influence relative to all NBA players (not just bigs) as smaller than one would expect. I can posit a few explanations for this. RAPM models are inherently a bit unstable for younger players because of small sample sizes. In addition, few players have been asked to shoulder such an enormous burden early in their career, and as we’ve demonstrated with his passing, Victor does not shy away from experimentation — which can be both good and bad.

Wemby has certainly demonstrated what made him so unique as a prospect. His shot diet has been absolutely mind boggling. In the past two seasons, he’s put up so many more pull-up threes than other big men that it feels like the only thing that remains traditionally “big” about him is his frame:

As someone who’s admittedly been accused of being more interested in experimental NBA players than rote productivity, it’s still hard to look at this and think that Victor is doing anything wrong. He’s probably not. Some may disagree, but if you’re playing next to very few productive teammates, it’s probably fine for your shot diet to veer from serious to audacious.⁴

And looking at the plot, you might be wondering why such a high pull-up rate could be considered a problem in the first place. After all, Wemby makes them at a decent clip. However, there are valid questions about whether Victor is sacrificing better opportunities for his team:

Even with his presence as a lob threat and shooter, it has yet to translate into consistently good shots for the Spurs. With him in lineups, the Spurs’ rim attempts actually fell off a bit (which is baffling given his physical advantages), and corner threes only improved slightly. In fact, long midrange attempts went up slightly, which is reason to be a little concerned. It may suggest that, despite the added attention, Victor isn’t yet capitalizing on it.

All of this offers an explanation for his underwhelming offensive impact metrics, like teammate shot quality RAPM and O-RAPM (Offensive RAPM). Still though, relative to his age, he’s way, way ahead of schedule, which makes this more of a caution flag than a flashing red one.

So what can we make of Victor? We’re obviously looking at one of the greatest young players the NBA has ever seen — and I think he’s poised for a gigantic leap this year. While the Spurs (who ranked second in our Future of the Franchise Rankings) aren’t yet title contenders, this is the first season they’re fielding a competitive supporting cast alongside him. And if there are a few obvious-ish flaws in his approach, flaws that are typical of developing players, that also means there are also obvious pathways for improvement. If I had to guess, health willing, he’ll be a strong contender for the MVP late into the season. Whether or not he takes home the trophy in a league with Jokic and SGA — probably not — he’s poised to graduate from “best young player” to the All-NBA 1st Team.

1. By the way, Aspiration is a great name for a real save-the-trees company, but an even better one for a fake save-the-trees company.

2. Not totally sure what the backronym is here.

3. So, pretty much anyone else.

4. This more or less explains my tolerance for LaMelo Ball’s shot diet, for instance.