Wembanyama Leads NBA in Blocks and Stocks, But 'Best Defender' Unproven
Victor Wembanyama topped the league in blocks and steals-plus-blocks per game in 2025-2026 while San Antonio ranked third in defensive rating, but box-score stats alone can't crown him the NBA's single best defender.
Published: · Figures as of September 2, 2026
Asked: Is Wemby already the best defender in the NBA?
Wemby leads the league's defensive box score, but "best" can't be verified
Victor Wembanyama topped both trackable defensive box-score categories last season (2025-2026, 64 games): 3.1 blocks per game and 4.1 combined steals-plus-blocks per game, both the highest marks among qualified players in the league. The Spurs also finished with the NBA's 3rd-best defensive rating (109.4 points allowed per 100 possessions, approximate) among the 30 teams with a computed figure. But whether he is THE best defender in the league is a claim our data can't fully settle — the metrics that would actually measure individual defensive impact (a defensive Box Plus/Minus, on-court plus-minus, tracking-based defense) aren't things we have.
What the box score shows
| Metric (2025-2026, qualified players) | Wembanyama | Next closest |
|---|---|---|
| Blocks per game | 3.1 (rank 1 of 234) | Chet Holmgren, 1.9 |
| Steals + blocks per game | 4.1 (rank 1 of 234) | Ausar Thompson, 2.9 |
| Team defensive rating (Spurs) | 109.4 (rank 3 of 30) | Detroit 107.3, OKC 106.0 |
The gaps at the top are not close — his 3.1 blocks/game is more than a block and a half clear of second place (Holmgren at 1.9), and his 4.1 stocks/game beats the next player (Ausar Thompson, 2.9) by over a full stock a game. That's a wide enough margin, on the categories we can measure, that it's a reasonable box-score case for the league's most disruptive shot-blocker/deflector.
Where this stops being conclusive
Three things this data cannot see:
- Positioning, closeouts, and communication — the parts of defense that don't show up as a steal or block. Blocks and steals reward event-generating defenders and can undersell a low-event anchor who simply prevents shots from happening.
- Individual defensive impact isolated from the team — Spurs' 109.4 defensive rating is a whole-roster number, not Wembanyama's alone; nothing in our data separates what he does defensively from what his four teammates on the floor are doing.
- BPM's defensive component and on-court plus-minus aren't something we compute or store, so there's no way to check his box-score dominance against an estimate of actual point-differential impact.
Bottom line (medium confidence): the evidence supports Wembanyama as the league's most productive rim-protector by the box score last season, and a team defense that finished top-3 by rating while he anchored it. It does not, by itself, establish him as the single best defender overall — that verdict would need play-by-play or tracking data neither this nor most public datasets carry in full, and it's worth remembering he also missed a 12-game stretch (November 16 to December 10) last season, so this reads on 64 of 82 games rather than a full year.