The True Wemby Stopper: Who Is the Best Victor Wembanyama Defender in the NBA?

If it wasn’t already apparent, Victor Wembanyama’s 41-point, 24-rebound masterpiece in a double-overtime victory of the Oklahoma City Thunder made it abundantly clear. The San Antonio Spurs big man’s reign of terror has officially begun. He is the best basketball player on the planet.

Wembanyama’s combination of size, length, agility, strength, and skill makes him unlike pretty much any player (shoutout Ralph Sampson) that has ever come before him, creating issues for practically anyone who takes on the Herculean challenge of trying to defend him.

I guess if you had to compare his dominance to someone from NBA history (outside of Sampson), it would be Shaquille O’Neal. Back then, opposing teams searched far and wide to find players who stood a chance of slowing him down. Now, they must execute the same search in order to keep Wembanyama and the Spurs from claiming the next ten NBA Championships.

But who are the current players who stand the best chance at slowing down this once-in-a-lifetime giant? To try to answer this question, we at EssentiallySports surveyed trusted media members throughout the league to get a sense of who can vanquish the real-life Goliath.

Basketball Our Criteria

Over the last couple of days, I messaged folks a simple question: who would your top five options be to stop Wembanyama in a one-on-one setting? I added the caveat that the player would also need to be competent enough on offense to avoid killing their team on offense.

In total, we received 33 responses from some of the best basketball laypeople in the game. I also reached out to a handful of coaches and former players. But alas, none of them responded. Just goes to show the kind of weight I carry around these parts. Still, our sample size yielded some pretty interesting findings.

For our criteria, we kept it pretty simple. Any time a player received a first place vote, they got five points. A second place vote was worth four, third place worth three, fourth place worth two, and fifth place was worth one.

Basketball The Truth About Stopping Wembanyama

As is the case with practically all all-time greats (see this video I did explaining why Gary Payton didn’t actually stop Michael Jordan), there is no way to actually stop Wembanyama. He’s just too good to completely neutralize.

Before answering, numerous voters joked that only divine intervention could stop Wembanyama at this point. One person refused to vote, stating that the only thing that could stop Wembanyama was Wembanyama himself. My personal favorite comment was when someone said De’Aaron Fox, the Spurs’ starting point guard, is the only person capable of neutralizing Wembanyama!

At the end of the day, you can only hope to slow down Wembanyama. So, when you analyze these results, be sure to keep that fact in mind.

Basketball The Results

Voting was all over the place for this one. There were 15 different players who recieved first place votes, and 33 total players who showed up on people’s ballots. The person who ended up “winning” this exercise only received six first place votes. This just goes to show how perplexing the riddle that is Wembanyama is to try to solve. Anyway, enough beating around the bush, here are our results:

There you have it. OG Anunoby is the unofficial winner of the Victor Wembanyama sweepstakes. Many voters admitted to me that their decision was partially influenced by this recent tweet from Caitlin Cooper:

If the Spurs and New York Knicks both end up advancing to the NBA Finals, we will get to see this hypothesis put to the test. By the way, Anunoby wasn’t the only Knicks player to receive some recognition. Mitchell Robinson came in 13th place, garnering two first place votes.

No one directly admitted to any social media posts biasing them in their decision to choose our runner-up, Giannis Antetokounmpo (who got five first-place votes). However, this recent tweet may likely have played a part in some people’s decision-making:

Maybe people are willing to meet the Milwaukee Bucks’ asking price for their former two-time MVP after seeing the dominant display Wembanyama has put on this postseason.

Rounding out the rest of our top five are Bam Adebayo, Scottie Barnes, and Rudy Gobert. Adebayo has a few top-five finishes in Defensive Player of the Year (DPOY) voting and has long been heralded as one of the most versatile defenders in the association. Barnes finished fifth in DPOY this year and has many of the physical traits that helped Anunoby finish first in this exercise. Gobert has won the DPOY award four times in his illustrious career, and before Wembanyama, he was widely viewed as the most formidable paint protector in the association. Gobert finishing this high just goes to show how futile defending Wembanyama is, especially after what the Young Frenchman did to his mentor in the Western Conference Semifinals.

Outside of Robinson, some other players who received first place votes that did not crack our top five include: Draymond Green, Evan Mobley (another player who could get a shot at stymying Wembanyama in the NBA Finals), Joel Embiid, Aaron Gordon, Ausar Thompson, Alex Caruso, and Jaden McDaniels.