When it became clear that Victor Wembanyama, who had been out since Monday with a rib contusion, was going to play Friday night, it was easy to assume he would play the minimum 20 minutes required for the game to count toward the 65-game threshold for postseason awards eligibility, and even in those minutes perhaps he would take it a little easy with the San Antonio Spurs already been locked into the West’s No. 2 seed.
He didn’t wind up playing much more than the 20. But in the 26 minutes he did play, he most certainly did not take it easy, dropping 40 points, 13 rebounds and five assists on the Dallas Mavericks for the fastest 40-10-5 game in NBA history.
Now that Wembanyama has met the 65-game requirement (the NBA Cup Final counts toward games played even though the stats from that game don’t count), he’s a lock for Defensive Player of the Year and first-team All-NBA. And if nothing else, this was one hell of a closing MVP argument.
Wembanyama has made no secret of the fact that he’s gunning for MVP, and good for him. His competitive spirit is palpable, not in any way artificial. And if defense really is half the game, it’s hard to argue that he’s not the most valuable player in the league.
Was being eligible for MVP worth the injury risk?
Of course, it’s equally hard to argue that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (the heavy favorite at -5000 at DraftKings) or Nikola Jokic (+4500) isn’t the MVP. Ultimately, Wembanyama (+2000) probably isn’t going to win the MVP, which begs the question of whether he should have even played on Friday in the first place.
Reasonable minds can disagree here. We’ve seen major injuries to major players in the last few weeks that will severely impact their team’s playoff potential. The Los Angeles Lakers lost Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves, and have gone from a potential contender to a likely first-round bounce. Cade Cunningham suffered a collapsed lung, though thankfully, he’s back playing for the Detroit Pistons and looks recovered.
For San Antonio, did the risk of potentially losing Wembanyama right before the playoffs to some freak injury outweigh the reward of getting him to the 65-game threshold for postseason awards? Plenty of people would say no, and those opposed to the 65-game rule would certainly argue they shouldn’t have been put in that situation to begin with.
But what if awards eligibility wasn’t the only reason for playing Wembanyama?
Why Friday’s win was significant for the Spurs
The Spurs are locked into the No. 2 seed, yes, but now that they beat the Dallas Mavericks on Friday, they are also in a position to potentially impact their playoff path depending on how they fare on Sunday against the Denver Nuggets.
If the Spurs win that game, and the Lakers beat the Utah Jazz, the Nuggets drop to the No. 4 seed, which means San Antonio would avoid both Denver and Oklahoma City until the conference finals. Making those two play each other in the second round would mean San Antonio would only have to beat one of them to make the Finals.
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On the other hand, if the Spurs lose to the Nuggets on Sunday, Denver will be the No. 3 seed and the Spurs would have to beat them in a second-round matchup and then beat the No. 1 seed and defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder in the conference finals to make it out of the West. Beating one of those teams in a seven-game series would be hard enough. Beating both of them would be exponentially harder.
Through that lens, there was real justification for playing Wembanyama on Friday to ensure a win over the Mavericks. We’ll find out whether that was the reason the Spurs risked it by whether they play Wembanyama on Sunday. If they don’t, then they only did it for the 65-game rule.
Can Wemby win the MVP?
To me, playing Wembanyama just to reach a 65th game was a poor choice, even if anyone can understand the desire to reward your franchise player with award recognition for the incredible season he’s had, and even though they got away with it. But I suspect that’s not the only reason they played him on Friday.
They wanted to win that game, and now they have a real incentive to win on Sunday. So I think he plays again, which creates another chance to make one more emphatic MVP argument.
If Wembanyama goes out there and dominates, and San Antonio beats Jokić and the Nuggets in a game with real seeding implications (certainly the Nuggets would prefer to avoid the Thunder in the second round if they can help it), would that leave enough of a taste in the mouth of voters to give him the edge in the MVP race?
Again, probably not. At this point, I think it’s Gilgeous-Alexander’s award. But Wembanyama wants it. He has a case for it. And I think he’s going to get the chance to put one more exclamation point on that case on Sunday against the Nuggets, if only because the Spurs have a lot more incentive to win that game than it might appear at first glance for a team already locked into its own seed.