Victor Wembanyama Is the Best Basketball Player in the World - Sorry SGA

On Monday night, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was honored by getting a standing ovation from his fans in Oklahoma City to celebrate his second-straight MVP award.

The best player on the defending champion team, Gilgeous-Alexander, deserved the award for the league’s best player for his consistency and leadership as the Thunder look to also win back-to-back titles.

But he is not the best basketball player in the world.

That honor belongs to the 7-foot-4 alien beamed down to France that journeyed abroad to join the San Antonio Spurs and make it his sole mission in life to not let Gilgeous-Alexander or the Thunder build a dynasty.

I’ve watched basketball for over 30 years, and few players in the playoffs have made me think that no one else could do what they do.

While I missed Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, I was there when Shaquille O’Neal toyed with grown men during his prime and made some of the imposing athletes on Earth look like children. The same can be said about LeBron James during his peak, a little over a decade ago, where he carried the physicality of a superstar NFL defensive end but had the skills of the best basketball player I’ve ever seen.

Now, after the opening game of the Western Conference finals between the Thunder and Spurs, I can add Victor Wembanyama to that list.

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Be it on the defensive end or on the offensive side, he was a cheat code, making threes, patrolling the paint like a claw machine, and driving to the rim like a point guard while the size of a giraffe.

Gilgeous-Alexander is a phenomenal player, but everything he does we’ve seen before and will see again. He is an elite version of a product seen many times in the NBA.

Wembanyama, though?

We’ve never seen a player of his stature move the way he does. When a player a few inches shorter than him gets fouled and falls to the ground, there’s usually a hushed silence of an injury. For Wembanyama, he springs back up instantly and is laughing, defying what it should mean to be a 7-foot-4 basketball player.

He scored 41 points with 24 rebounds and even threw in three assists for good measure in one of the greatest single-game playoff performances of the 21st century.

At the end of the game, when the Thunder were trying to hold on, Wembanyama simply cleared out under the basket, bullied the foot-shorter Alex Caruso, and gingerly slammed the ball down as if it was the equivalent of a regular human throwing out the trash.

We are still years and years away from knowing where Wembanyama will end up as an all-time player, and if his body will still spring to life so effortlessly in a half-decade, but that doesn’t change the fact of the moment.

SGA might be the MVP of the NBA, but Wembanyama is the undeniable MVP of the sport.

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This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 10:05 PM.