The Net Wins formula is a career instrument. It rewards players who accumulate seasons, who build combined totals over time, who sustain their excellence across years rather than flashing briefly. It is precisely the wrong tool to evaluate a 22-year-old who has played three NBA seasons, one of which was taken from him by a blood clot.
And yet what it is already finding in Victor Wembanyama is worth paying attention to.
What the Formula Sees So Far
2023-24 (22-60 Spurs): -4.81 net wins 2024-25 (36-46 Spurs): -0.41 net wins 2025-26 (62-20 Spurs): +7.52 net wins
Career total so far: +2.30 Career average: +0.77
The negative numbers in his first two seasons are not a knock on Wembanyama. They are a knock on the teams around him. The formula normalizes every player’s contribution against what their team was doing when it won and when it lost. On a 22-win team, the losing context is so compressed that even excellent individual play struggles to generate positive numbers. The formula sees the same thing everyone watching those games saw: a generational talent surrounded by a roster that had not yet caught up to him.
Then 2025-26 happened. The Spurs won 62 games. Wembanyama posted +7.52, which as a single season is already in elite territory and comparable to the peak years of players further up in these rankings. He was 22 years old.
The trajectory from -4.81 to -0.41 to +7.52 is not the formula correcting itself. It is a player developing at a rate the formula has rarely seen.
The Long Road to Here
The story starts in Riga, Latvia, in July 2021. Wembanyama was 17 years old, playing for France in the FIBA U19 World Cup Final against the United States. He put up 22 points, 8 rebounds, and 8 blocks. The performance was extraordinary. France lost 83-81. Chet Holmgren, two years older, was named tournament MVP.
That loss stayed with him. Wembanyama later admitted the rivalry with Holmgren carries extra charge because of what happened in Riga. Both players became top-three picks, both became defensive anchors of Western Conference contenders, and both spent years being compared to each other in every available context. When asked about the rivalry in December 2025, Wembanyama dismissed it publicly, saying there was “no comparison” between them. The dismissal itself told you everything about how much it still mattered.
Then came Paris 2024. Home turf. France in the Olympic gold medal game for the first time in decades. Wembanyama scored 26 points and 7 rebounds. Stephen Curry scored 36 points in the second half, hit shot after impossible shot in a building that was supposed to be hostile to him, and the United States won 98-87. Wembanyama was visibly devastated at the final buzzer.
Two silver medals. First to Holmgren’s USA at 17. Then to Curry’s USA at 20, on home soil, with the whole country watching. The competitive motor underneath the alien athleticism was running at a frequency most people had not yet registered.
The Year That Was Taken
In his second NBA season, 2024-25, Wembanyama was averaging 24.3 points, 11 rebounds, and 3.8 blocks per game when deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder ended his year early.
The parallel to Jordan’s broken foot in 1985-86 is worth drawing carefully. Both were players of obvious transcendence in only their second seasons. Both had a year interrupted by injury rather than decline. Both returned the following season and produced something close to their ceiling. Jordan came back in 1986-87 and scored 3,041 points. Wembanyama came back in 2025-26 and won the Defensive Player of the Year award unanimously, the first unanimous winner in the history of the award, while averaging 25 points, 11.5 rebounds, and 3.1 blocks on a 62-win team.
The blood clot year, like Jordan’s broken foot year, is a data point the formula has but cannot fully use. It counts what happened: -0.41 on a 36-win team in limited games. What it cannot count is what a full healthy season at 21 would have looked like. Based on what surrounded it, the number would have been significant.
The All-Star Problem
There is a version of Wembanyama that the NBA’s marketing apparatus wants to present: the friendly alien, the chess-playing, Star Wars-loving, Louis Vuitton-wearing curiosity who learned English from television and trained at the Shaolin Monastery in the summer of 2025. All of that is real and all of it is interesting.
There is another version that emerged at the 2025 All-Star Game in San Francisco. The league had been struggling for years with an exhibition that had turned into a non-contact scoring carnival. Wembanyama arrived and said before the game: “I’m definitely not here to make friends.” He then played the All-Star Game the way he plays every game.
Anthony Edwards, watching from the opposing bench, said afterward: “I ain’t gonna lie. Wemby set the tone. He came out playing hard, so it’s hard not to match that.” The game became competitive. The format changed for 2026. Wembanyama changed the All-Star Game by refusing to treat it as anything other than basketball.
It is the same quality that drove the U19 loss in Riga to stay with him for years. The same quality that made him visibly upset in Paris after losing the gold medal game. It is not performance. It is just what he actually is.
What the Comparisons Miss
LeBron James called him “more like an alien” before his rookie season. The comparison list from analysts includes Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Dirk Nowitzki. Wembanyama himself has cited Kevin Durant and Giannis Antetokounmpo as models for parts of his game.
The comparisons are all honest and all incomplete. A 7-foot-4 player who can handle the ball, shoot threes off the dribble, defend guards in space, and block 12 shots in a single playoff game does not map cleanly onto anyone who came before him. The 12-block game against the Timberwolves in the 2026 playoffs set the NBA postseason record for blocks in a single game. His Game 1 performance against Oklahoma City in the Western Conference Finals, 41 points and 24 rebounds in double overtime, produced a stat line the formula had not seen in the playoffs from any player in the database.
The formula will eventually have a complete picture of what Wembanyama is. The career totals will accumulate, the seasonal averages will stabilize, the composite ranking will settle somewhere. Right now it has three seasons including one truncated by illness and one on a 22-win team. The number it has found in the one full season where everything was right is +7.52, at age 22.
For context, here is what the formula found from the other great centers in the database at comparable ages and career stages:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, rookie season, age 22: +8.09 Bill Russell, rookie season, age 22: +3.03 Hakeem Olajuwon, rookie season, age 22: +3.50 Wilt Chamberlain, rookie season, age 23: -1.10
Wembanyama’s +7.52 in his third season, the first full healthy one, is already ahead of three of the four greatest centers in the history of the sport at the same stage of their careers. The only player who produced a higher number at 22 was the man who sits at the top of this entire database.
Kareem’s +7.00 average per season over 20 years is what makes him the formula’s all-time leader. Duncan’s +7.00 average over 19 years puts him second. Bird’s +7.21 over 13 seasons puts him third in composite ranking.
Wembanyama’s first full healthy season on a competitive team produced +7.52. He is 22 years old.
The formula is just starting to see him. What it’s finding suggests the rest of this database may eventually need to rearrange itself.
The full Net Wins database, 295 NBA players and every season from 1946 to 2026, is free at willf123.github.io/nba-net-wins.
Next: Shaquille O'Neal at #8. He shot 43% from the free throw line and still produced one of the ten greatest individual seasons in the history of the sport. Subscribe to get it when it drops.
© 2026 Will Fiore. Net Wins formula and all written content are original works. All rights reserved.
