New 2024-2025 MVP rankings make unfathomable Wembanyama claim

It's draft day and the possibilities are seemingly endless for the San Antonio Spurs. That happens when you have cap space, multiple lottery picks and a generational star that will, no doubt, attract players old and new who want to hitch their wagon to the next great thing. While the draft coverage continues to rage, it felt right to drop in some conversation about Victor Wembanyama and where he falls on the early 2024–2025 MVP rankings released by Bleacher Report.

To get the obvious out of the way, it is laughably early to project who the MVP candidates will be when the offseason is just getting underway. Free agency has yet to open, and the draft hasn't even begun but being too early to the party is never frowned upon as much as being too late. On this list, NBA writer Andy Bailey decided he'd rather be the former when constructing this list, adding Victor Wembanyama's name at the ninth spot.

Victor Wembanyama can become the youngest MVP in history

To be clear, asking the NBA media to vote for Wemby for the Most Valuable Player Award in his second season would be like asking Rose to let Jack on the wooden door in the Titanic movie. You can ask, but it's not going to happen. The jump the Spurs would need to have for that to be a feasible outcome is monstrous, and San Antonio has too many holes on their roster for that kind of uprising.

Keep in mind that the ranking is a top-ten list, and Victor lands at number nine; they are not predicting he'll win. Russell Westbrook won the honor in OKC as a 6th-seed with a 46-35 record. That is the worst record for an MVP winner since Kareem Abdul-Jabbar took the award home in 1976 with a 40-42 record.

The likelihood that the Silver and Black take a Superman-esque leap while still fielding the youngest roster in the league is slim. But the acknowledgment is impressive. His numbers last year suggest that Vic will be a perennial MVP candidate yearly, but imagining him hoisting that trophy next year is too much excitement for Spurs fans to contain. As if the future doesn't look bright enough.