- - Victor Wembanyama woes? How NBA teams are finding ways to stop the Spurs

Nekias DuncanNovember 8, 2025 at 12:19 AM

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Maybe this is the Guy Who Has Only Seen Boss Baby meme in basketball form, but watching the San Antonio Spurs over their past two games — a pair of losses — has reminded me of Becky Hammon and the Las Vegas Aces.

First, it took me to a comment Hammon made about her team’s defense after they won their first title back in 2022. In part of her answer about their willingness to throw out different defensive looks, she drew on her NBA experiences with the Spurs.

“We’ve tried different defenses on Steph Curry, Damian Lillard,” she began. Then the line that stuck: “If we can ‘junk it’ on them, we can ‘junk it’ on anybody.”

Also from yesterday: I asked Becky Hammon about the Aces' versatile defense and the thought process behind implementing it. pic.twitter.com/tL2ZB8PaJi

— Nekias (Nuh-KY-us) Duncan (@NekiasNBA) September 19, 2022

It then reminded me of this year’s WNBA Finals win, in which the Aces sprinkled in a box-and-1 to throw off the early rhythm of the Phoenix Mercury in Game 3, then a triangle-and-two to kick off their series-clinching Game 4 win. Being willing to make a game messy isn’t a shared trait among everyone, but it’s becoming increasingly important in both leagues. Stars are too good. They dictate too much.

That brings us back to Victor Wembanyama, the Spurs’ recent sputtering, and a simple, rhetorical question: did we really think it was going to be this easy all year?

The Spurs, 5-0, led by a superhuman destroying the league one what-did-I-just-witness highlight at a time … with no shifts in plan? Oh no, no, no, no, no.

We know Wembanyama is talented enough to produce his first-five averages: 30.2 points, 14.6 rebounds, 3.4 assists, 1.4 steals and 4.8 blocks. But there wasn’t a world in which teams wouldn’t get more creative, more daring, more weird in an effort to prevent that.

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Put another way: If the fastball, the slider, and the changeup aren’t working, you might have to sprinkle in an Eephus if it’s in your bag.

Sure enough, it’s looked different during these back-to-back L’s. Wembanyama scored nine points on 14 shots and turned the ball over six times (with only two assists) against the Phoenix Suns. In the famed Luka-versus-Wemby duel on Wednesday night, Wembanyama finished with 19 points on 5-of-14 shooting while racking up another five turnovers. You can even zoom out a bit if you’d like to different pockets of previous games: first quarter of the Nets game, second half of the Pelicans game, early fourth quarter of the Heat game.

Some seeds are being planted, buddy.

So, what’s happening?

On a basic level, teams are working to disrupt the early rhythm of Wembanyama by taking away space.

When attempting to set up shop on the block, you’ll often see Wembanyama’s defender — likely a wing or forward, especially as of late, with the actual center roaming off a non-shooter — work under him, pushing him out (within the rules, of course) to make sure he’s catching the ball further from the basket.

From there, Wembanyama has to read (or attack) a thicket of bodies. It could be peeled-in early help. It might be immediate double teams. There might be (several variations of) zone defense.

It's obviously been a tremendous season for Victor Wemby, but boy it's been fun watching teams try to throw the kitchen sink at him.Off-ball physicality, doubles, zone, aggressive gap help, the classic "wing/forward on star while the center plays free safety behind him" gambit. pic.twitter.com/eulWffNzTh

— Nekias (Nuh-KY-us) Duncan (@NekiasNBA) November 7, 2025

None of those concepts are new, but the uptick in volume is noteworthy. A few stats for your consideration, courtesy of GeniusIQ tracking data:

After averaging an absurd 1.38 points per possession (PPP) on trips featuring a Wembanyama drive through the first five games, that figure has dropped to 0.87 PPP across the two losses.

Wembanyama logged a total of 15 drives in those games — four against the Suns, 11 against the Lakers — with a help defender present on every single one of them. The Lakers game was the first time in his career he logged double-digit drives with a 100% help rate.

After seeing a second defender, or a pure double team, on a season-high 29.4% of his touches against the Lakers, Wembanyama has now seen that time of attention on 22.6% of his touches this season. That ranks third — behind Giannis Antetokounmpo (27.2%) and Zion Williamson (26.3%) — among 142 players to log at least 300 touches this season. For career reference, Wembanyama saw that level of attention on 14.6% of his touches as a rookie, and that slightly dropped to 14.4% last season before it was cut short. This is a huge uptick.

We’ve seen a similar rise in zone defense, particularly when Wembanyama is on the floor. The Spurs have seen a zone on 5.2% of their possessions with Wembanyama present: roughly double his rookie season rate (2.63%) and over five times the rate last season (1.04%)

Unsurprisingly, as Wembanyama has tried to work through these looks and matchups, the Spurs have struggled. When faced with zone, the Wemby-led Spurs have generated a typo-worthy 0.38 PPP. They’ve fared much better on the possessions where Wembanyama is double-teamed (1.04 PPP), but that’s still well below their usual efficiency when he isn’t.

How does this get better?

The boring answer is time and reps. While acknowledging things have ramped up, Wembanyama conveyed a lack of long-term worry to reporters following their loss to the Lakers.

"There's no worry, really," Wembanyama said. "As we've gotten better as a team and got better individually as well, it's like the opponents have stepped up in some ways defensively. I feel in a way that the game feels fast right now. We're going to catch up on it, of course.”

[Get more Spurs news: San Antonio team feed]

Some of this could be solved with better shooting. As of this writing, the Spurs are shooting 14 of 43 (32.6%) from 3 off Wembanyama’s passes. Harrison Barnes and Julian Champagnie are notably shooting a combined 3 of 14 (21.4%) on those looks — that should bounce back in a major way as the sample grows.

A good bit of this could just be De’Aaron Fox making his return and taking some of the pressure off Wembanyama. This is, after all, an All-Star caliber guard who should finally have a fully functioning shooting hand.

There are spacing tweaks that could be made to simplify things — or at the very least, force defenses to show their hands earlier. I’ve become a big fan of the flat spacing alignment (example here), where there is a player in each corner, and a third player lurking around the baseline to maximize top-of-the-floor space for a two-player action. Wembanyama has already run 12 pick-and-rolls with that sort of alignment this season after running 12 total last season. We’ve seen a similar increase in that setup with Wembanyama as a screener (3.6 per 100 possessions this year, 1.9 per 100 last year).

The Spurs have also worked to get Wembanyama the ball in the middle of the floor, near the free throw line (nail!) area. When facing up in that spot, it gives Wembanyama a cleaner view of the floor and allows him to see where and when extra help may be coming from. More designed touches there, in addition to reps and experience, should lead to more fruitful opportunities.

While I’m personally confident that Wembanyama and the Spurs will work through this, it is important for them to work through this as quickly as they can. If the Pelicans and Nets feel like they can fluster you with zone or double teams, of course a strong defense like the Heat (first in half-court defense, per Cleaning the Glass) would experiment.

The Spurs have the Rockets (sixth in half-court defense), Bulls (ninth) and Warriors (11th) in four of their next five games. It would behoove them to take some of these junk looks off the table before “interesting counters” become The Book on Stopping The Spurs™️.

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Source: “AOL Sports”