ESPN's MVP prediction burdens Victor Wembanyama with glorious purpose

I've gone over some of the selections made in ESPN's Summer Forecasts, but I haven't touched on their Most Valuable Player choice yet (I had to save it for dramatic effect). Well, they didn't just pick Victor Wembanyama as the favorite to win his first-ever MVP award; they ran him up the board.

Wemby pulled in 102 points in the panel's weighted voting. That's Captain America "on your left," laps ahead of Nikola Jokic's 31 for second place. That's a landslide for a guy who finished third in the last race behind Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the Joker himself.

We've known for a long time that Wembanyama would own the NBA, but these results are just one indication that, at 22 years old, that future begins now.

The bar was set before Wembanyama played a game

This isn't new for Wemby, even with higher stakes now. Back in 2023, before he'd logged a single NBA minute, FS1's Chris Broussard gave a striking example of what would count as disappointing for the Alien: anything short of LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O'Neal, and Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

In Broussard's world, a career on par with Kevin Durant, Anthony Davis, or even Hakeem "The Dream" Olajuwon would be a letdown. Those guys have five championship rings combined.

People roasted that take at the time.

Three years later, ESPN's own panel just installed him as the runaway MVP favorite off a Finals run nobody expected and a unanimous Defensive Player of the Year award. The absurd standard and the current reality are starting to look closer than most predicted.

Nobody holds other stars to this bar

Nobody's upset if Nikola Jokic never wins another MVP. They're not rewriting Giannis Antetokounmpo's legacy with hardware he already has. Kevin Durant, for all the noise he's generated himself, never got treated the way Bron was from year one—judged against an all-time bar that keeps moving every time he clears it.

That's the tier ESPN's panel just slid Wemby into. It's a small group of about three or four guys, tops, where anything short of a specific number of MVPs and rings reads as underachievement instead of a great career.

Dwyane Wade is already on the record. He wants to see San Antonio's French superstar with four or five MVPs and/or a crazy number of championships. It can't just be a great career. Wemby's tasked with delivering more than that.

It's not happening in a vacuum either. The same panel picked San Antonio second only to OKC in the race back to the Finals, and MVP voting has never lived apart from team success. So for the first time in his career, both projections point in the same direction simultaneously.

The wildest part is Vic isn't flinching. Asked about the outsized expectations before he'd even been drafted, he brushed it off, saying he feels no pressure and plans to prove the doubters wrong. That's someone who's already decided the bar is exactly where he wants it.

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