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No but it’s a minimum requirement. If you put the best defender in the league onto the team with the worst defense, they wouldn’t be bottom 5. Probably not top 5, but they’d at least be decent. In the same sense that you can’t make an argument for being the best player in the league if your team misses the playoffs. Individual stats are all flaws in some way, ultimately it has to translate to team success because that’s the actual goal.

Not on a bottom 5 defense he’s not

Point differential is totally fine to use to determine the winner of a group because everybody played the same teams.

Point differential is insane to use to determine wild cards when the groups can be so wildly unbalanced. Phoenix is in over Minnesota because they played in a group with us, Memphis, and Portland, 3 bottom 4 teams in the west.

I think it’ll be even better once the league expands to 32 teams. Groups of 5 are kinda awkward. 3-1 teams not advancing feels weird. 8 groups of 4 that all play each other twice, winner goes to the quarterfinal will be cool once 2 more teams are added.

Wemby has negative BPM and Win Shares too btw

The whole concept of “empty stats” is that they’re easy to accumulate on a bad team that’s not super focused on winning and will let their star kinda do whatever because they want to keep them around.

Us being bad sure hasn’t stopped Lauri from being crazy efficient.

Chet should be #3

Chet absolutely has been more impressive than Wembanyama, and it’s not even remotely close. Him being in a better situation doesn’t change that.

Holmgren’s first 16 games are arguably the most impressive first 16 games of anybody’s career, up there really with just MJ and Kareem. He’s also younger than MJ or Kareem were as rookies.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to immediately be a hugely positive contributor to a top team on day 1 of your professional career like Chet has? It’s incredibly difficult and rare. And as games have gone on Chet has shown more and more that he can be so much more than a role player offensively, and his role will probably get bigger and bigger as the year goes on.

Tbh if Wembanyama didn’t exist and wasn’t taking up so much attention Holmgren would be getting hyped as somebody with GOAT potential for how he’s played so far. Literally nobody has ever shown the ability to be all of an elite rim runner, elite spot up and pull up shooter, elite rim protector and a great perimeter defender. The closest would be KD’s best form at Golden State, but he still never got to Chet’s level as a rim protector. What he’s doing would be incredibly impressive even if he wasn’t a rookie and even if he wasn’t a 7 footer.

Wemby really bamboozled people by just chucking tons of jumpers and then people only watched the ones that went in.

He’s a bad shooter. He’s always been a bad shooter, even in the 12th(?) best European league. He can still be a great Anthony Davis-style player if he gets better discipline defensively (and he probably will as he gets older), but at some point he’s gonna have to let go of this idea that he’s a sharp shooter. There’s really no reason for him to ever be pulling up like he’s KD.

I would say yes.

There’s a handful of things you need to win a title. Shot creation, playmaking, spacing, rebounding, a lockdown perimeter defender, and rim protection.

You can get the offensive things from any position really. Usually the playmaking is gonna be a guard, but it doesn’t have to be. Rim protection and rebounding pretty much has to come from the center position though. You can get some from the PF spot but it’s usually supplementary. Having just a guy at center makes it a lot harder to contend than having a just a guy at any other position. You can still be a contender for sure, but that requires having truly all time talent elsewhere.

And even the teams which have won with unimpressive centers have still needed really solid players there. Tristan Thompson was actually pretty good in 2016, Longley on the Bulls wasn’t bad either. But those teams also had GOAT level players with excellent secondary stars.

He’s not a great defender yet. His blocks are very Hassan Whiteside-ish right now. He gets a lot but he bites on every fake. The spurs defense even with him on the floor is still bottom 5. He has a long, long ways to go mentally on that side of the floor. He’s super slow to recognize when to help and he’s constantly giving up easy buckets by overcommitting hunting for blocks. His defense is a far cry from elite at this stage.

I mean I already had that opinion prior to the season.

If you watch wemby’s highlights he looks like the best player ever, sure. But that’s true of a lot of guys. He’s a legitimately terrible outside shooter. The fact he can get his shot off whenever literally doesn’t matter when he shoots 40% from midrange and 30% from 3.

Wemby can be a phenomenal rim runner, but Anthony Davis is probably his ceiling offensively. The idea that he’s gonna be a great shooter someday has never had any basis. His percentages have been pretty consistently bad.

Wembanyama also blocks a lot of shots, but he bites at literally everything. Right now his block numbers are pure empty calories. If you go for everything you can get tons of blocks, but you can also get punked falling for pump fakes from Rudy Gobert of all people (happened to him twice in the same game, yikes) and stumbling into the stands while a guy strolls to a layup because you fell hard for a fake closing out a 3.

Chet’s a better defensive prospect too. That’s what I think most people struggle with. He has 99th percentile measurables too, but he’s shown far, far more actual skill and intelligence defensively, even at Gonzaga, than Wembanyama’s ever shown. He’s got better instincts, better timing, and way better discipline. Wemby’s 2 extra inches don’t make up for that. People wildly overrate tools relative to skill defensively. Having a 7’9” wingspan doesn’t make you Rudy Gobert.

Give me the guy that’s shown the skills over the guy I have to hope develop them every day of the week. And Wemby is a great prospect no doubt. But Chet’s the guy that’s shown GOAT potential. And not just potential, but the ability to be positive in virtually every single way on the court that I can’t remember any other player ever showing.