In June 2025, four months after a blood clot had ended his second season, Victor Wembanyama shaved his head, put on the robes, and spent ten days at the Shaolin temple in Zhengzhou, China, studying kung fu and meditation with the monks. He was 21. He had not played a five-on-five game since February. The photographs that came back showed a seven-foot-four man sitting cross-legged in front of a Buddha, and the sport had no idea what to make of them, which by then was the usual condition of watching him.
He was born on January 4, 2004, in Le Chesnay, France, to a father who had competed in track and a mother who played and coached basketball, and he grew, and kept growing. Nanterre at fifteen, a season at ASVEL, then Metropolitans 92 outside Paris, where in 2022–23 he became the youngest Most Valuable Player the French league had named. LeBron James, asked about him, said he was “more like an alien.” San Antonio won the lottery, and on June 22, 2023, made him the first Frenchman taken first overall.
The record is short. It is not thin.
The rookie year answered the anticipation: 21.4 points, 10.6 rebounds, a league-leading 3.6 blocks a game, the Rookie of the Year award on every ballot, and a place on the All-Defensive First Team, which no rookie had been given before. He was an All-Star at 21 the following February. Days later, on February 20, 2025, the Spurs announced a deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder and shut him down after 46 games. He was averaging 24.3 points, 11.0 rebounds and 3.8 blocks at the time, and he still finished the season as the league’s leader in blocked shots, having missed its last two months.
He went to China, was cleared in July, and came back. In 2025–26 he played 64 games, averaged 25.0 points, 11.5 rebounds and 3.1 blocks, led the league in blocks for a third straight season, made the All-NBA First Team, and in April 2026 became the first unanimous Defensive Player of the Year in the award’s history, at 22 the youngest to win it. The Spurs went 62–20 in their first season under Mitch Johnson, after Gregg Popovich stepped aside, and in the playoffs beat Portland, Minnesota and then Oklahoma City in seven games, Wembanyama opening that series with 41 points and closing it on May 31. He was the conference finals’ Most Valuable Player on every ballot. In the Finals, San Antonio’s first since 2014, the Knicks won in five; the last game, on June 13, 2026, finished 94–90, and he had 19 points, 14 rebounds and 5 blocks in it.
His 2023–24 Panini Prizm card, number 136, is the one collectors follow, in its Silver parallel, the mirrored chrome finish. It is the same set and the same parallel that recorded Giannis Antetokounmpo ten years earlier, which is roughly how the hobby now keeps its calendar: one Silver Prizm per rookie class, remembered by the player who mattered. Most rookie cards are printed as a guess. This one was printed with the outcome already assumed, and the first three seasons held to it.
Three seasons, fewer than two hundred regular-season games, one of them cut off in February by something no coach can scheme against. Nearly everything about him is still provisional except the height and the manner. He is a person who spent a summer with monks and came back and blocked more shots than anyone. The Finals loss in June 2026 was the second hard thing on his record. The first was the clot, and he answered it inside a year.