No Title but What a Year for Victor Wembanyama.

The first healthy season changes everything

The baseline fact that shapes this whole year: Victor Wembanyama played 64 games and started 55 of them. That doesn't sound remarkable until you remember why it's the headline. His second season ended in February with a blood clot in his shoulder that required season-long treatment and real questions about his career. Every conversation about him for the year and a half before this season started with health, not talent.

This season, that conversation mostly went away. He averaged 25.0 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.1 assists, 3.1 blocks and 1.0 steals a night, shooting 51.2 percent from the field and 35.9 percent from three. He won Defensive Player of the Year. San Antonio had a top-three defense with him on the floor and finished with home court in the first round for the first time in the Wembanyama era.

Games

64

Minutes

29.1

Points

25.0

Rebounds

11.5

Assists

3.1

Blocks

3.1

Steals

1.0

FG%

51.2

3P%

35.9

TS%

62.6

The run through Oklahoma City

San Antonio's playoff path went through the two best teams in the league. In the Western Conference finals they beat the defending champion Thunder in seven games, a series where Shai Gilgeous-Alexander shot 40 percent or worse from the field in four straight outings and Wembanyama's length was a constant problem at the rim. It was San Antonio's first trip to the NBA Finals since 2014.

Across the full postseason, Wembanyama averaged 23.8 points, 10.9 rebounds and 3.5 blocks on 48.5 percent shooting. He wasn't just good against a tired Thunder team either. Stephon Castle and De'Aaron Fox gave him enough shot creation around him that he rarely had to force anything, and the defense he anchored held up against everyone the West could throw at it until the very end.

Five games from a title that got away

The Finals were the one place the season didn't fully deliver. San Antonio's only win in the series came in Game 3, when Wembanyama went for 32 points, 8 rebounds and 6 assists. New York took the other four, closing it out on their own floor behind Jalen Brunson's 45-point Game 5. Wembanyama's response in that closeout loss was still a monster line: 19 points, 14 rebounds and 5 blocks in 38 minutes, which is either a fitting way to end a breakout year or a preview of what a healthy prime version of him looks like against a team that's already built to win now.

Spurs coach Mitch Johnson called it the biggest lesson of the team's life. That's a fair way to describe a 22-year-old getting outlasted, not outplayed, by a team with more championship pedigree in the room.

What it means for the market

For Hardwood Index readers, this is a market rewarding trajectory over outcome. Wembanyama didn't win anything in June, but he answered every question that actually mattered about him: can he stay on the floor, can he anchor a top defense over 64 games, can he be the best player on a Finals team at 22. The 27.91 percent gain over the past year says the market cares more about a healthy Wembanyama proving he belongs on that stage than it does about the scoreline in Game 5. Health was the discount on his price for two years. That discount is gone now.

Bottom line

San Antonio has its two best players locked into their primes at the same time, which almost never happens for a team that just lost the Finals. The question for 2026-27 isn't whether Wembanyama is good enough to win a title. This season answered that. It's whether a healthy full season is now the expectation rather than the exception, because the version of him that just played 64 games and made a Finals in his third year has a much shorter path back to that stage than the version that spent two years being talked about in the conditional tense.