Third season in the league, 22 years old – and Victor Wembanyama has sat atop the NBA.com’s official MVP ladder.
If he wins it, he walks away with Derrick Rose’s record, too. Rose has been the youngest MVP in league history since 2011. Wembanyama would be about three months younger on the day the regular season wraps up. Small margin, big deal historically. There’s currently a clear favorite in the race, and many sites like pari match reflect this shift.
Why This Is a Real Conversation Now
Rose won his MVP in his third season, too— and also with a team that jumped faster than anyone expected. The Spurs are running a similar script right now. Since February, they closed the regular season at 30-4, clinched the No. 2 seed in the West, and rank among the top teams on both ends of the floor.
Wembanyama is carrying both sides of that simultaneously, which is rare even by the standards of the league’s best players. A recent game against Nikola Jokic and the Denver Nuggets made that visible – 34 points, 18 rebounds, seven assists, and five blocks in a game San Antonio lost in overtime by two.
The team came up short, but nobody walked away with questions about Wemby.
Who Else Is in the Race?
The MVP race this season has genuine depth, and the competition is serious. Three names kept coming up all year before Wembanyama took over the conversation:
- Shai Gilgeous-Alexander keeps doing things guards simply aren’t supposed to do – four seasons straight of 30-plus points on elite shooting efficiency, a combination only Michael Jordan pulled off before him.
- Nikola Jokic had built one of the strongest MVP cases in recent memory before his injury cut that momentum dead.
- Luka Doncic spent most of the season rewriting what a Lakers star could look like in 2026, then a hamstring gave out at the worst possible moment – one game short of the eligibility threshold.
All three made real cases at different points this season. What separates Wembanyama from each of them is something none of them offer – impact on both ends without any trade-off. Jokic and SGA are elite offensively, but neither comes close to Wembanyama’s defensive footprint.
What History Actually Shows
Going back through 40-plus years of NBA history, players who cracked the top five in both MVP and Defensive Player of the Year voting while suiting up for a team that won over 70% of its games took home the championship that same season exactly half the time. Jordan, Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Hakeem Olajuwon – that’s the company Wembanyama is currently tracking toward. He’s already become the first-ever unanimous Defensive Player of the Year.
The MVP vote will be settled very soon. But even if the ballots break differently, this season has already made the point – Wemby isn’t a project or a promise anymore. He’s producing at the highest level right now, and the playoffs will settle whatever questions remain.
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