Spurs’ Gregg Popovich explains how Victor Wembanyama has improved on defense
San Antonio Spurs rookie Victor Wembanyama has emerged as one of the top shot blockers in the NBA, and coach Gregg Popovich believes the 7-footer is improving each game.
Wembanyama is averaging 20.5 points, 10 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 3.2 blocks and 1.1 steals on 46.8% shooting from the field in 49 games. He leads the rookie class in points, rebounds and blocks and is the only first-year player with four 30-point games.
The top pick leads the league in blocks and is 10th in defensive box plus-minus (plus-2.3) and 15th in defensive win shares (2.6). The Spurs, as a team, are fifth in blocks per game (6.1), with Wembanyama leading the way each night.
Popovich explained how Wembanyama has improved in that area.
He is learning about who he is guarding because he has no idea who these guys are. You can watch them on film, but it doesn’t mean anything until you get out on the court with them, so that has been an education for him. He is learning how to use his length more where he doesn’t have to get up into people. Obviously, he has taken a great liking to being a great shot-blocker. He has gotten better and better at that as far as understanding the schemes defensively that we want to employ and knowing that he is the leader in that regard.
Wembanyama registered his second triple-double this week, recording 27 points, 14 rebounds, 10 blocks and five assists in a win over the Toronto Raptors. He became just the fourth rookie to record a triple-double with blocks.
He is still putting up big numbers despite logging fewer than 30 minutes on average. The team has limited his playing time since he rolled his ankle in December, and he only started playing in back-to-back games at the end of January.
Popovich believes his minutes should increase.
It is amazing the numbers he is getting in for that few minutes but we’ve decided that’s the best way to bring him along right now. I think toward the end of the season, we’ll probably raise it a little bit. I think we had three or four weekends in a row with three (games) in four nights or something like that, so it was fun to see how he’d react. Once or twice, he reacted like a rookie. He hit the wall, for sure. They all do. There was a point there where he had played in more games this year than all of last year in half of the time.
Wembanyama is emerging as a force on both ends of the floor for the Spurs and has only scratched the surface of his potential. He has proven himself as a generational talent in a small sample size and should only become more dominant with time.
