The San Antonio Spurs haven’t had a player win regular-season MVP since Tim Duncan accomplished the honor in the 2002-03 season. According to FanDuel, they have one of the best chances to change that this year than they’ve had in a long time. Victor Wembanyama has the fifth-best odds (+1500) to win the award for the upcoming campaign.
It was surprising enough to most people when they saw Vic hit the fifth spot last season on the Kia MVP Ladder in January. But if you asked most observers, they’d say that the Spurs were overachieving at the time. They were winning half of their games in his second year, and nobody thought they were capable of that.
Chris Paul was the starting point guard at 39 years old, and Harrison Barnes wasn’t looked at as a huge pickup—even though he turned out to be just that. Jeremy Sochan didn’t get much respect, and neither did most of the roster. The driving force of the early success was Wemby, and he can prove himself again this season by taking another leap in his game, but it can’t be only him.
What is Wembanyama’s path to an MVP?
Team success is a major factor in this award. So, this can’t be a play-in team. The Silver and Black must find a way to get into the playoffs outright and secure a fourth or fifth seed with a monster year from Wembanyama driving the bus. That last part shouldn’t be a problem, but the rest is up in the air until we see it on the floor.
I’m optimistic about the progress of this ball club, but optimism won’t win games. De’Aaron Fox will be instrumental in this journey; however, two players can’t get it done alone. The entire team needs to come along for the ride. It’s going to be a bumpy one. The Western Conference is as tough as ever, with parity being the recent key term of this era. That’s a good and bad thing for San Antonio.
Anyone can beat anyone in this league right now. We saw the Spurs beat some of the league’s best last season. That shouldn’t change. But they also lost games that frustrated fans to no end. They’ll need to clean some of that up this season to win enough games to not only skip the NBA Play-In Tournament, but give Vic a real shot to win MVP as the youngest player of all time to do so.