ESPN didn’t just tab Victor Wembanyama as the favorite to win MVP in its Summer Forecasts. It put him way out front.
The panel gave Wembanyama 102 points in its weighted voting, a massive cushion over Nikola Jokic’s 31 for second place. That kind of gap is no ordinary nod; it’s a statement. Wembanyama, who finished third in the last race behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jokic, has now been pushed to the top of the board at 22 years old.
That level of expectation has been attached to him for a while. Back in 2023, before he had played a single NBA minute, FS1’s Chris Broussard laid out a stunning standard for what would qualify as disappointing for Wembanyama: anything short of LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
In Broussard’s view, even a career on the level of Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, or Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon would fall short. Together, those three players have five championship rings. That was the kind of mountain Wembanyama was being asked to climb before the league had even seen him in action.
Now ESPN’s panel has taken that same kind of lofty framing and made it feel a lot more immediate. Wembanyama is coming off a Finals run nobody expected and a unanimous Defensive Player of the Year award, and the MVP prediction drops him into the very top tier of NBA stardom.
The standard is no longer hypothetical. It’s here.
And unlike some of the other stars who have occupied that space, Wembanyama is being measured against an especially narrow definition of success. Nobody is losing sleep if Nikola Jokic never wins another MVP.
Giannis Antetokounmpo already has the hardware that matters. Kevin Durant, for all the attention he has generated, was never judged from day one the way LeBron was.
That’s the company ESPN’s panel has now placed Wembanyama in: the tiny group where anything short of a specific pile of MVPs and championships starts to look like falling short rather than building a great career.
Dwyane Wade has already said as much, saying he wants to see the San Antonio French superstar collect four or five MVPs and/or a crazy number of championships. For Wembanyama, a great career won’t be enough.
There’s another layer to all of this, too. ESPN’s same panel picked San Antonio second only to OKC in the race back to the Finals. MVP conversations don’t live separately from team success, and for the first time in his career, both projections are pointing in the same direction at once.
Wembanyama, for his part, brushed it off, saying he feels no pressure and plans to prove the doubters wrong. That sounds like a player who knows exactly how high the bar has been set - and is already aiming right at it.
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