The most interesting player of the 2024-25 NBA season tips off on Thursday, as Victor Wembanyama’s San Antonio Spurs take on the Dallas Mavericks on TNT. The 2023 no. 1 pick was the unanimous Rookie of the Year winner last season, the Defensive Player of the Year runner-up, and the star of the most extraordinary highlight reels. He enters his sophomore season as an award favorite and top-15 player.

Wembanyama stuffed the stat sheet as a rookie, averaging 21.4 points, 10.6 rebounds, 3.9 assists, and a league-best 3.6 blocks per game. He became the first rookie in NBA history—and only the second player, along with Raef LaFrentz in 2001-02—to record 200 blocks and 100 3-pointers in a season. And he improved after the All-Star break in almost every statistical category.

His unique combination of pedigree and production has the entire NBA ecosystem salivating about how high the 7-foot-4 Frenchman might rise in his second year. FanDuel odds as of this week expect Wemby to average about 26 points and 12.5 rebounds per game—which only Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Joel Embiid have reached in a season in the last decade.

Wemby is special, but different parts of his game do have precedents via other outstanding rookies from draft classes past. And by analyzing how those early stars fared in their sophomore seasons, we can generate a better sense of what the San Antonio center’s production might look like in 2024-25.

Points

In the 3-point era (since 1979-80), 30 rookies before Wemby averaged at least 20 points per game. Surprisingly, that group barely boosted its production in year two, with both its points-per-game and points-per-36-minutes figures rising by less than one point. Scoring improvement evidently isn’t always linear.

Of note, however, is that the top four second-year scoring improvements belong to four of the best players in NBA history: Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal, and Luka Doncic (who’s certainly on the trajectory of a league legend).

That’s not a universal relationship—Duncan and Bird aren’t near the top of the leaderboard, for instance—but of the 10 players in this sample who made multiple All-NBA First Teams in their careers, the average increase was a more robust 2.4 points per 36 minutes. (Allen Iverson is the only member of that group whose scoring declined in his second season.)

It’s probably safe to assume that Wemby is more like Luka and Shaq than he is Tyreke Evans and Glenn Robinson, so our expectation should be that he’ll increase his scoring by 2-3 points per 36 minutes, rather than the 0-1 that the overall group average would suggest. Given his projected playing time this season—more on that in a moment—that sum comes out to 26 points per game, right in line with FanDuel’s expectation.

Usage and Playing Time

One of the key questions about Wembanyama’s production this season is what kinds of opportunities he will receive. It should help that he’ll spend all of his minutes playing with real point guards in Chris Paul, who has a history of creating phenomenal looks for centers, and Tre Jones. 

But while Wembanyama might enjoy an increased quality of opportunities this season, his quantity of opportunities might not increase as much. Playing on a talent-starved team as the clear no. 1 option last season, Wemby became only the sixth rookie on record with a usage rate of at least 30 percent. But four of the other five used fewer possessions as sophomores.

And while Wembanyama’s scoring leapt after the All-Star break last season, that was mostly a reflection of increased playing time. Wemby’s minutes rose 14 percent after the break (from 28.4 to 32.5 per game). His scoring rose by 14 percent, too, and his rebounds rose by 19 percent.

(Wemby’s assists rose by 66 percent from before the break to after it, however, from 3.2 to 5.3 per game, as he handled the ball much more later in the season. He could easily average five-plus assists per game over a full season—as FanDuel odds expect of him—but that’s largely dependent on his role in an offense with Paul and Jones at point guard.)

Wembanyama’s playing time in 2024-25 probably won’t rise much more than his 32.5 minutes per game after the 2023-24 All-Star break, though. Devin Vassell led the Spurs with 33.1 minutes last season, and Keldon Johnson led with 32.7 in 2022-23.

3-Point Shooting

Wemby could quickly increase his scoring even more as a sophomore if he were to make his 3-pointers at a higher rate. He sank only 32.5 percent of them last season, which ranked 101st out of 108 players with at least 300 attempts.

It’s difficult to find any precedent here because Wemby is such a unique player in a unique period of NBA history. He attempted 5.5 3-pointers per game last season. Only one other rookie center has ever attempted at least four 3s per game: Chet Holmgren, also last season.

Holmgren was much more accurate (37 percent), but since we also don’t know how he’ll fare in his second season, he’s not a very useful comparison for this exercise. Instead, we’ll have to cast a wider net to find clues to Wemby’s year-two shooting.

For this sample, then, we looked at all rookies, at any position, who attempted at least 250 total 3s and made between 30 and 35 percent of them. Those parameters gave us a group of 32 players (not counting Wemby, fellow rookies Scoot Henderson and Keyonte George, or players who were severely injured as sophomores), including a mix of role players and stars.

On average, this larger pool of players improved by just 1.1 percentage points from distance as sophomores, which would take Wemby up from 32.5 percent as a rookie to 33.6 percent as a sophomore. That’s not a meaningful increase; it would amount to about four extra made 3s all season if Wemby’s volume remained the same. 

But in this category, Wemby’s precedents have exhibited a huge range. A handful of these players—most recently Jabari Smith Jr. and Bennedict Mathurin—improved by more than 5 percentage points as sophomores. Conversely, some others—most recently Jaden Ivey and Jalen Green—shot worse in their second seasons, even after underwhelming debuts.

The results are mixed even among stars. Anthony Edwards (32.9 percent), Luka (32.7), and Trae Young (32.4) were all as inaccurate as Wemby as rookies. As sophomores, Edwards and Young both improved to 36 percent—but Doncic fell to 31.6 percent and didn’t meaningfully improve from distance until year three.

Rebounds

In the 3-point era, 20 rookies before Wemby had averaged at least 10 rebounds per game. But their rebounding rate actually declined in their second seasons, on both a per-game and per-minute basis.

Only two of these players increased their rebounding rate by more than 0.7 per 36 minutes as sophomores: Dikembe Mutombo at 1.2, and Dwight Howard at 1.1. Because Wembanyama averaged 12 rebounds per game after the All-Star break last season, that figure still seems like a reasonable expectation for 2024-25—but more than 13, which the betting lines say would be possible, seems extremely unlikely.

Blocks

At 20 years old, Wembanyama is a good offensive player. But he is an extraordinary defender, whom NBA general managers already rate as the best in the league. Wemby’s length, athleticism, and instincts make him a terror at the rim, giving him the opportunity to record a quadruple-double and lead the league in blocks—as he did as a rookie—every year for the foreseeable future. 

How high might Wemby climb here? He averaged 3.6 blocks as a rookie, so even a small increase could make him the first blocks champion to average at least four swats per game since Mutombo in 1995-96.

However, like with many of the other statistical categories, previous rookies who have averaged at least three blocks per game or a block percentage of at least 8 percent (Wemby was at 10 percent) haven’t tended to boost their blocks in year two. Perhaps their reputations grew so fearsome that opposing players didn’t challenge them as often, reducing their opportunities for further swatting. The Wemby “U-turn effect” might hurt his chance to reach this benchmark.

Wembanyama’s ceiling

This historical analysis might seem underwhelming. Across almost every category, the average outstanding rookie has either not improved much or outright declined as a sophomore. But by definition, basically all of the players we’re analyzing as comps were statistical outliers as rookies, so some level of regression is natural; many still developed into All-NBA-level players after a second-season plateau. A handful of Wemby’s elite comps even peaked in some statistical categories as rookies. For instance, Shaq’s career highs in rebounds and blocks came in his first season with the Magic—and that didn’t prevent him from reaching Bill Simmons’s Hall of Fame pantheon.

Against this historical backdrop, it’s eminently possible that Wembanyama’s overall statistical line won’t look all that different in 2024-25 than it did in 2023-24—or, at least comparable to what he did after the All-Star break last season. 

That production alone would make Wemby an obvious All-NBA selection this season. That’s actually a fairly common outcome for second-year stars: 24 sophomores have made an All-NBA team in 45 seasons of the 3-point era, or about one every other year. 

But Wemby’s combination of youth, all-around production, and remarkable rate of skill development mean that a mere plateau seems unlikely. His rise hasn’t shown any evidence of slowing yet. So what about the opposite? What might a best-case statistical sophomore scenario look like for the reigning Rookie of the Year winner?

Luka scored 7.2 more points per 36 minutes as a sophomore than he did as a rookie. And Mutombo averaged 1.2 more rebounds per 36, and 0.6 more blocks per 36.

If Wemby improved his averages by those same amounts in 2024-25, he’d average an astonishing 30 points, 13 rebounds, and 4.5 blocks per game. With those numbers, he wouldn’t just be an All-NBA honoree—he’d be a lock for the First Team, which only Luka has achieved as a second-year player this century. (Tim Duncan, Penny Hardaway, Latrell Sprewell [!], and David Robinson did so in the ’90s, as did Larry Bird in the ’80s.) Heck, this version of Wemby might even be the front-runner for MVP! And no player in NBA history has ever won that award at that point in his career.

Zach Kram

Zach writes about basketball, baseball, and assorted pop culture topics.