The night Victor Wembanyama became the best basketball player in the world

With out-of-this-world Game 1 vs. the Thunder and the league's MVP, the Spurs star's status became undeniable

Every year, sometime in the late summer or early fall, sports outlets, including us here at CBS Sports, publish their top 100 NBA player rankings. When the time comes prior to the start of next season, everyone should have Victor Wembanyama at No. 1.

With one of the most dominant performances in modern league history, which is to say non-Wilt Chamberlain history, in the Spurs' thrilling double-overtime win over the Thunder in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals on Monday, Wemby erased all reasonable doubt as to who is the world's best player. 

He's him, as the kids would say. 

Victor Wembanyama leads Spurs to Game 1 win vs. OKC: Ranking Wemby's top five plays from 2OT masterpiece Jack Maloney

Wemby's final line looks like something out of a glitched video game: 41 points, 24 rebounds and three blocks in a career-high 49 minutes. Only two other players in history have authored a 40/20/3 line in the conference finals or later: Shaquille O'Neal and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Filter not just for the 40/20 round numbers and run Wembanyama's actual total box score, and only Wilt Chamberlain comes up. 

41+ pts, 23+ reb, 3+ ast, 3+ blk In the NBA Playoffs Wilt and Wemby pic.twitter.com/mYNCJSUTPV

— Tom Haberstroh (@tomhaberstroh) May 19, 2026

What sets Wemby apart

I've always wondered how it must've looked watching Wilt in his prime. For someone to be not only that much bigger than everyone else, but more athletic and skilled, too, had to have been a trip. That's how it is watching Wemby right now. He is so uniquely dominant, it feels nearly impossible to wrap your head around, let alone actually put into words. 

For me, there is one particular stat our research department uncovered that speaks best to Wembanyama's unprecedented package of dominance: At 22.2 points, 11.9 rebounds and 4.0 blocks per game so far in the postseason, Wemby would currently be the seventh player in history (and ninth instance overall) to average 20/10/4 for a postseason. The others are Hakeem Olajuwon (3x), Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Elvin Hayes, Abdul-Jabbar and Robert Parrish. 

That's impressive enough company, but where it gets really wild is when you look at the three 3-pointers those other six guys combined to make in those postseasons. How many 3s has Wembanyama hit in these playoffs? Fifteen and counting. Including the biggest one of his life on Monday.

That's the difference. You look at all the greatest big men to ever play, from Wilt to Russell to Shaq, Hakeem, Duncan, Abdul-Jabbar and on down the list, and while all of them were virtually unstoppable forces inside (as Wembanyama is, too), none of them had anything close to Wembanyama's perimeter pop. 

A 7-foot-4 dude pulling up from the logo with his team down three and under 30 seconds to play in overtime of a conference finals game in the first postseason of his career, and drill it, is bananas. 

WEMBY, WOW! WHAT A SHOT TO TIE THE GAME AT 108. pic.twitter.com/HELQUpxww7

— NBA (@NBA) May 19, 2026

... And he took that personally

That is yet another feather in Wembanyama's best-player-in-the-world cap: Not just the ability to make that shot, but the onions to take it in the first place. He is 22 years old, in his first playoff run, and he's already carrying around prime Kobe confidence with the killer instinct to go with it. 

Wembanyama is such a team guy. You can see the way everyone rallies around him. But he also takes all of this extremely personally. It's not selfish. It's authentic. He rubs his superiority in Chet Holmgren's face every chance he gets. He openly campaigned to win the MVP, clearly believes he should have, and wasn't afraid to sit up at the podium following Game 1 and tell everyone he was out to make a statement after watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander be handed the trophy before tip off.

Like Vince Young upstaging Reggie Bush in the Rose Bowl after Bush won the Heisman that Young clearly believed belonged to him, Wembanyama went out on Monday night and dwarfed SGA, the back-to-back league MVP, in every imaginable way. 

Wemby on whether Game 1 was personal after watching Shai win MVP 😤 pic.twitter.com/dTSTEuOMTo

— ESPN (@espn) May 19, 2026

Gilgeous-Alexander got it going a little bit late, but ultimately, he needed 23 shots to score 24 points as Wemby forced him (and all the other OKC players) to survive on a bunch of jump shots as he basically single-handedly closed off the paint. The Spurs switched all over the court to keep Wemby stationed on the back line, sagging off some shooter so he could act as a roaming rim protector. 

It worked. Alex Caruso had to make eight 3s just to keep OKC in reach. That is probably not a repeatable formula for OKC moving forward. Gilgeous-Alexander is going to have to get going on tough jumpers because the Spurs are dropping down into his driving lanes, and even if he somehow gets through that mess, Wemby is waiting for him like a human windmill. 

The Thunder need Holmgren to play big in this series, literally and figuratively, but he scored just eight points on Monday and didn't make his first bucket until there was less than a minute to play in the second quarter. Meanwhile, Wembanyama committed to operating from the elbows down rather than downsizing his height advantage by settling for a bunch of 3s, as he did early in the first round against the Trail Blazers. 

When he attacks inside, he is impossible to stop. We can get very sophisticated in our basketball analysis, but in this case, it's very simple: Wemby is just taller than everyone else. You can throw it up to him like he's playing against his little brother's friends, and he can just turn and put it in the basket like it's a nerf hoop. 

WEMBY WAS UNBELIEVABLE IN HIS WESTERN CONFERENCE FINALS DEBUT 🤯 41 PTS (20 combined in 4Q, OT, and 2OT) 24 REB (new postseason career-high) He becomes the youngest player in NBA history with 40+ PTS and 20+ REB in a postseason game, previously done by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar… pic.twitter.com/PFuPNxsrL6

— NBA (@NBA) May 19, 2026

Wemby is ready, and so are the Spurs

Keep in mind, the Thunder are one of the best defensive teams you will ever see, and he made mincemeat of them. On the road. In his first conference finals game ever. At 22 years old. It's not supposed to happen this fast, not for a player or a team. The Spurs won 34 games last year. This is a monumental leap happening in front of our eyes. 

I suspect that's why I was alone among my CBS colleagues in predicting the Spurs to win this series (I've been on record from the start that they're going to win not just the West but the whole thing), because the easy thing to say is "they're too young" or "they're not ready." 

It's true, they're young. But there's nothing about them that says not ready. Dylan Harper is ready. Stephon Castle is ready. But Wemby is the one. Sometimes guys are just different, and when they come along they force you to abandon basically all the logic you have acquired over years of watching the NBA. This was a problem for people with Stephen Curry and the Warriors in 2015, too. It was hard to believe in something you'd never seen before. Until it was too late. 

That's Wembanyama. He warps the geometry of the court to the same degree a young Curry did, and in the time it takes for everyone to even halfway adapt, he's already taken over the league. 

That's what happened on Monday night. The NBA became Wembanyama's league. We watched it in real time. You can say it was one game, and sure, that's true. But this has been coming for a while now. Wembanyama has simply made it official. He's the best basketball player in the world, and there's nothing anyone, even the guy with the actual MVP trophy, can do about it.