While the NBA trade deadline was exactly two weeks ago, there’s always the possibility that some earth-shattering news will drop in the Association. Well, on Thursday, February 20th, we got some when ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama is out for the season with a blood clot in his right shoulder.
Wembanyama is averaging 24.3 points, 11.0 rebounds, 3.8 blocks, 3.7 assists and 1.1 steals per game for San Antonio this season. He was looking like an absolute force on both ends of the floor, and he was quickly turning into one of the NBA’s biggest draws. Also, in addition to Wembanyama passing the eye test, pretty much every advanced metric you can find suggests he’s one of the best players in basketball.
This is a huge blow to fans around the league, and it’s obviously brutal for San Antonio. The Spurs are currently 23-29 and were hoping to make a push for the 10th spot in the Western Conference. After all, they did just make a big move in trading for guard De’Aaron Fox. Now, San Antonio will likely struggle to win games, making a postseason appearance very unlikely.
However, the biggest impact of Wembanyama missing the final 30 games of the season is what it means for his end-of-season awards cases. Wembanyama was previously -2500 to win the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year award, and he was also on a path towards making the All-NBA and All-Defensive teams — in addition to potentially finishing Top 5 in MVP voting. Unfortunately, Wembanyama will end the year with only 46 games under his belt, and the NBA’s 65-game rule is going to bite him in a big way. That’s a shame, too. Those game minimums were put in place to prevent somewhat healthy players from sitting out games. Wembanyama has a legitimate health issue, making it odd he’s going to be punished for it. But that’s neither here nor there.
For bettors, the Defensive Player of the Year market is the interesting one. Wembanyama had a stranglehold on that market for months, and his implied probability of winning the award was 96.15%. Well, that all changed today. Here are the 10 players that DraftKings Sportsbook has as betting favorites to win Defensive Player of the Year now:
(Odds accurate at the time of publishing, but they may shift rapidly)
- Jaren Jackson Jr. (-115)
- Evan Mobley (+125)
- Dyson Daniels (16-1)
- Luguentz Dort (18-1)
- Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (35-1)
- Jalen Williams (40-1)
- Bam Adebayo (70-1)
- Amen Thompson (75-1)
- Rudy Gobert (80-1)
- Giannis Antetokounmpo (150-1)
Daniels is an intriguing option at 16-1. That’s a good price for a player that has been widely praised for his perimeter defense this year. Daniels leads the league in steals per game (3.0) and steals percentage (4.1%). He’s also eighth in the NBA in Defensive Box Plus-Minus (2.6), and his +1.9 Defensive Estimated Plus-Minus has him as one of the highest-ranked perimeter players. On top of that, BBall Index has Daniels graded as the top player in the league in Matchup Difficulty, and he’s sixth amongst point-of-attack defenders in D-LEBRON. If Daniels continues to rack up steals and put up a fight against some of the NBA’s best guards on a nightly basis, he’s going to have a shot at this. That’s especially true with some of the traditional rim protecting options lacking the right type of resume.
Bringing things back to Wembanyama, it should be noted that a full recovery is expected. On SportsCenter, Charania noted that San Antonio feels this is an isolated incident and that shutting him down now will get him ready for the start of the 2025-26 season.
It’s also worth mentioning that Toronto Raptors forward Brandon Ingram dealt with a similar diagnosis — deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in his right shoulder — and missed the final 19 games of the 2018-19 season. But Ingram was back on the court for the start of the 2019-20 season, and blood clots haven’t been an issue for him since — at least to public knowledge. With that in mind, the Spurs are hoping this isn’t a career-threatening issue, like the blood clots in the lungs that ended Chris Bosh’s career.
