Something has changed in the NBA, and I’m not sure it’s getting enough attention.
Let’s start by presenting a story in three video clips. All three are from the opening quarter of the Jan. 6 game between the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs, and all three feature Bulls center Nikola Vučević — enjoying a banner year! — attempting to score against the Spurs’ 7-foot-3 Victor Wembanyama.
Scene 1: The show and go
We’re 90 seconds into the game, and Vučević is going to his bread and butter, a pick-and-pop with Josh Giddey. Vučević has been cooking from outside this year, but when he pick-and-pops against Wembanyama, he knows the Spurs big man can recover and block his jump shot. So Vučević wisely shot fakes and cruises to the rim for what he thinks is an easy layup, only to have Wembanyama rudely smite his offering from behind.
Scene 2: The up and under
Two minutes later, Vučević gets Wembanyama on the block and knows his usual offering of jump hooks with either hand is likely to end up in Row 7 if he tries it. Instead, he goes to the shot fakes … and it works! Wembanyama is off his feet!
Unfortunately, Wembanyama recovers so quickly that when Vučević goes up for his layup, Wembanyama is already bounding for a second jump. He doesn’t just block it — he swallows it with his hands.
Scene 3: Capitulation
One minute later, Vučević catches a perfect bounce pass from Zach LaVine one foot from the basket and seems to have an uncontested layup or dunk … except he senses the looming presence of Wembanyama.
Vučević turns down the first shot and tries to dribble into Wembanyama’s body. That doesn’t work either. Instead, despite being 7-feet tall and inches from the basket, Vučević meekly kicks out and resets, and the Bulls ultimately commit a turnover.
This play, what I call the “Hell naw,” is Wembanyama’s true specialty. It needs to become an official stat. His greatest power isn’t the shots he blocks; it’s the ones opponents don’t even dare to attempt. The Bulls had their high-scoring big man wide open under the basket and couldn’t get a bucket out of it.
Wembanyama blocked eight shots that night, and while the Bulls ended up rallying to beat San Antonio, the larger story arc of Wembanyama’s defensive dominance this season is only gaining steam.
GO DEEPER
Victor Wembanyama has grown into NBA’s best defender — and he’s still improving
Vučević’s dilemma shows the quandary of going up against Wembanyama: What the heck are you supposed to do against this guy? He can cover the entire lane in a single bound, needs a nanosecond to load up for his jump (or second jump!), and his arms are longer than a CVS receipt. Good luck trying to score on him.
In just his second season, the French center has blocked 4.0 shots per game — the most in the NBA in nearly three decades and only the fourth time in the last decade a player has cleared 3.0 (one of those was Wembanyama last season at 3.6; that itself was the most since 2015-16). His 10.6 percent block rate is only exceeded in a single NBA season by Manute Bol.*
(* Sidebar you can skip if you’re not nerding out on this stuff: The way block rate is calculated could slightly favor Wembanyama when comparing with players outside the 3-point era; it basically assumes 3s don’t get blocked, but Wembanyama has blocked eight 3-pointers this season according to pbpstats.com).
Wembanyama swats 5.8 shots per 100 possessions, and only 11 players in the entire league have played at least 500 minutes and blocked even half as many.
Want a more amazing stat? With 127 blocks through Sunday’s games, you know many times Wembanyama has been called for goaltending?
Four! That’s it.
Needless to say, the results back up his impact. The Spurs give up 7.2 points fewer per 100 possessions when he plays and surrender a much lower field goal percentage. Inside 6 feet, opponents shoot 50.2 percent against the Spurs when he’s the closest defender and 62.9 percent the rest of the time. That’s as big a difference as any other player in the league who has played the bulk of his team’s games, and unlike some of the other players at the top of that particular leaderboard, it’s based on a healthy sample size of 262 shots.
In doing so, Wembanyama has basically single-handedly dragged the Spurs into the top half of the league in defensive efficiency and into the Western Conference playoff race. He’s become the runaway front-runner for Defensive Player of the Year at the age of 21, a year after finishing second in voting. And that, friends, is my long-winded lead-in to the real story here:
The kids are taking over on defense.
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This has never been the way of the NBA. Mastering defense was something that was supposed to take years. But as the game has opened up and prioritized mobility and switchability, it’s been easier for younger players to enter the league and make a more immediate impact. Wembanyama is one example — nobody is trying to mash him into the stanchion the way players might have a decade ago.
While the older cohort still has its share of elite defenders — 31-year old Rudy Gobert won Defensive Player of the year in 2023-24*, most notably — we’ve had a fairly abrupt changing of the guard in the past few seasons that only accelerated in 2024-25. (*All ages in this story are as of Feb. 1 for the season in question.)
Take 21-year-old Dyson Daniels in Atlanta, for instance. Liberated from a crowded backcourt in New Orleans, The Great Barrier Thief is running with the league lead in steals and deflections in his third season, to the point that his 225 deflections on the season are 87 more than second-place Kelly Oubre Jr. Only six players in the entire league average even half as many deflections per game as his 6.6 per. His team doesn’t reach the midpoint of its schedule until Saturday, yet Daniels is closing in on the point where he could shut it down for the year and still lead the league in deflections.
If there were an Eastern Conference Defensive Player of the Year race, Daniels’ biggest rival would likely be the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 23-year-old Evan Mobley. He has been the linchpin of the defense for a 33-5 Cavs team that is running away from the rest of the East; he also finished third in Defensive Player of the Year voting two years ago (the Memphis Grizzlies’ Jaren Jackson Jr. won).
At 25, Jackson is not exactly a grizzled vet (see what I did there?) either. He, along with Wembanyama, Mobley and Daniels, are the four players to be recognized as Defensive Player of the Month this season. Thus, every winner of the league’s newest honor has been 25 or younger.
Again, this is a massive difference from how things have been historically. Nobody under the age of 22 had meaningful vote share for Defensive Player of the Year in any of the six seasons between 2016 and 2021, and the 2017, 2018 and 2019 All-Defensive teams didn’t feature a single player under the age of 24. As recently as 2019, eight of the 10 players on the two All-Defensive squads were 27 or older.
This season? It’s possible Wembanyama and Daniels finish first and second as 21-year-olds. We might also see all five first-team All-Defense spots go to players 25 or younger when you add in players like Mobley, Jackson, Oklahoma City’s Jalen Williams (23) and Lu Dort (25), Houston’s Amen Thompson (21), Minnesota’s Anthony Edwards (23) and Jaden McDaniels (24) and Orlando’s Goga Bitadze (25) — and that’s with the Thunder’s fly-swatting Chet Holmgren (22) out with an injury.
Atlanta’s Dyson Daniels defends Boston’s Jaylen Brown as he drives to the hoop in November. (David Butler II / Imagn Images)
The impact of young defenders becomes even more profound when we look not at players, but at teams. I’m old enough to remember when the phrase, “We’re young,” was code for, “We’re fun and all, but we’re gonna get lit up on defense.”
That still happens in some corners of the league — the Washington Wizards, Toronto Raptors, Utah Jazz and Portland Trail Blazers represent four of the league’s bottom five defenses while also sporting average ages between 23.8 and 24.8.
But look at the top! The top four defensive teams in the league aren’t just young but really young; the Thunder, Magic, Rockets and Grizzlies all have an average age below 25.
It’s not as if they’ve been operating in optimal conditions, either: The Magic and Grizzlies have been losing a different player to injury every week, while the Thunder have had extended absences from two of the league’s best defenders (Holmgren and Alex Caruso). Many of the successful teams just behind them rely on youthful stalwarts, too, like Mobley on ninth-ranked Cleveland and Wembanyama on the 13th-ranked Spurs.
Meanwhile, the old guys are mostly winning with offense. Veteran teams such as the Cavs, New York Knicks, Boston Celtics, Dallas Mavericks and Denver Nuggets are shredding the league, sporting the NBA’s top five offensive attacks. On the flip side, only injury cases such as the Philadelphia 76ers and LA Clippers have truly wretched offense among the older cohort. (Thanks for asking, Warriors fans, but I’m not quite willing to put you in that group just yet.)
Oklahoma City is without a doubt the league’s paramount example. The top eight players in minutes all are 26 or younger, and even that may understate things. Two of the most impactful have been Williams, a switchable Houdini who has seen extended run as a 6-6 center and somehow mastered rim protection despite playing point guard in college, and 21-year-old Cason Wallace, a ball-hawking guard with the team’s highest steal rate. Williams and Wallace also are third and fourth in the league in deflections.
Yet despite relying almost entirely on young players, the Thunder are poised to be one of the best defensive teams of all time. If not the best, actually. Their 103.9 defensive rating is 9.4 points below the league average; since team turnovers began being tracked in 1970-71, no team has ever finished a season that far below the league average, with the 2003-04 Spurs having the post-merger record at 8.8 points.
Sure, the Thunder have likely had some good fortune from the free-throw line and 3-point gods — opponents are shooting only 75.6 percent from the line (28th) and a league-worst 32.5 percent from 3, including 35.3 percent on “wide-open” 3s, according to NBA.com. But I mean … Holmgren only played 10 games! Caruso has barely gotten any run yet! They had to play nearly an entire month without any bigs!
We’re at a point where the learning curve is faster because talent is mattering as much or more than strength and technique. As a result, we’re seeing players make massive leaps forward as soon as their second and third seasons in the league.
Wembanyama, at the individual level, and the Thunder, at the team level, are our two shining examples. But look deeper, and examples of both types abound all over the league. Things have changed, y’all.
CapGeekery: The week that wasn’t
I was excited to bring you the blow-by-blow of salary-cap arcana from the contract guarantee date this past Tuesday, normally one of the most active weeks on the NBA calendar.
And then … crickets. You know how many rostered players have been waived since Jan. 1? Three! And one of them (Oklahoma City’s Branden Carlson) immediately signed a 10-day contract with the same team.
This, in itself, is notable. League-wide, the entire approach to non-guaranteed or partially guaranteed contracts has subtly changed because of revised salary-cap and trade rules over the last half decade. For starters, fewer of these deals are signed in the first place (it’s just easier to do a two-way).
Beyond that, however, the strategy of salary matching for trade purposes has left teams guaranteeing contracts even when the basketball value of the player nears zero. Indiana, for example, guaranteed James Wiseman’s deal even though he’s out for the season, occupying the 15th roster spot, and the team is just a few Galactic Credits from the luxury tax line (to be exact: $126,514). The Pacers also guaranteed James Johnson, who has played 25 total minutes this season.
In the case of Wiseman, in particular, having his $2.5 million team option to potentially use in trades into the offseason likely offsets any short-term inconvenience.
Ditto for the Nets, who guaranteed the deals of Jalen Wilson and Keon Johnson despite their own proximity to the tax line and the fact that neither player has exactly taken the league by storm. Again, both have team options that extend into the offseason and thus could be sources of valuable, deal-greasing matching salary even after the trade deadline.
Finally, did you notice we saw none of the salaries traded? A favorite trick back in the day was for a team in the tax to sign a non-guaranteed deal, then pay another team in cash to take it just before the cut date in January. However, with teams deep in the tax no longer able to use cash in trades, that modus operandi has essentially vanished under the new collective bargaining agreement.
In the end, the tax teams had no action at all this past week. All three waived players were cut by teams well below the tax line. If you’re a fan of unwinding arcane salary-cap maneuvers every January, I’m sorry to tell you we have entered a much duller era.
Devin Carter drives past Golden State’s Dennis Schröder during a game at Chase Center. (Kelley L. Cox / Imagn Images)
Rookie of the Week: Devin Carter, 6-3 PG/SG, Sacramento
(This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week. Just the one I’ve been watching.)
We finally got our first good look at Devin Carter, Sacramento’s rookie guard who was selected 12th in the 2024 draft but missed nearly half the season because of shoulder surgery in the summer. Carter played five games this past week, including double-figure-scoring efforts against the Warriors and Celtics, and seems embedded in the Kings’ guard rotation. Hey, they’ve won every game he’s played!
A combo guard whose size may require him to play the point full time, Carter still seems more comfortable doing the nitty-gritty. He’s pulled down 23 rebounds in his 61 NBA minutes, including some tough contested ones, continuing a pattern that stood out from his college data. Meanwhile, his moonball jumpers continue to come down with water on them just as they did at Providence, and he needs to prove he can make more than a third of them.
The Kings’ impressive win over Boston on Friday showcased some subtle skills of his that are likely to help him carve out a role and help explain why I was high on him in the draft despite his being one of the oldest first-round prospects.
In addition to the rebounding and being able to make the right play on the second side of the offense, Carter profiles as a good defender despite his lack of size. Watch here, for instance, as Payton Pritchard tests him mere seconds after he checked in Friday. Carter walls off his drive without fouling and forces Pritchard to bail into a kickout.
Offensively, his role has been a bit more constrained. His best work, actually, might have come on a shot that didn’t count. Watch here as he sizes up Jayson Tatum with the offense frozen and the shot clock running out and completes a left-hand drive and finish over and around him. Alas, the basket was taken away by replay review since it came after the shot clock went off. (One other thing you’ll notice there: No travel was called, but Carter’s left foot can get a little happy at the start of his jab-step moves. That wasn’t the only example.)
Sacramento has a crowded backcourt on its full-strength roster, but between Malik Monk’s ascension to the starting lineup and Doug Christie’s willingness to use more small players at once, there would seem to be a regular role for Carter even when everyone is healthy. He just needs to keep showing he warrants the trust.
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(Top photo of Victor Wembanyama: Ronald Cortes / Getty Images)
