Description

Victor Wembanyama arrived in the NBA already carrying more hype than perhaps any prospect since LeBron James. A 7-foot-4 Frenchman who had been turning heads in European basketball since he was a young teenager, he played for Nanterre 92, then ASVEL, before starring for Metropolitans 92 in France's top league, where in his final season he led the LNB Pro A in scoring, rebounding and blocks and was named league MVP. The San Antonio Spurs, who had finished the previous season with a 22-60 record, won the draft lottery and used the No. 1 overall pick on him in June 2023, a selection that had been treated as a foregone conclusion for months. He did not explode immediately. As one recap of his rookie year put it, he didn't immediately storm out of the gate, but it wasn't long before the 20-year-old was able to show off what is going to make him special for a long time. Once he found his footing, the numbers became historic. He finished the 2023-24 season averaging 21.4 points, 10.6 rebounds and a league-leading 3.6 blocks per game, and along the way he strung together performances no rookie had matched in decades — the first rookie since David Robinson in 1990 to record a 10-block triple-double, and, eleven days later, only the second rookie ever to post a 5x5 stat line since blocks and steals became official stats in 1973-74. He capped it with a 40-point, 20-rebound game in late March, one of only five rookies in league history to do so. The individual brilliance came without a winning team around him — the Spurs were still deep in a rebuild — yet the league recognized what it was watching. Wembanyama received all 99 first-place votes from a media panel, making him the first unanimous Rookie of the Year since Karl-Anthony Towns in the 2015-16 season, and also the first player from France to win the award, which dates back to 1952-53. He was a unanimous All-Rookie First Team selection and, remarkably for a first-year player, was also named to the All-Defensive First Team, becoming the first rookie to make First Team All-Defense and the youngest in league history to do so. He even finished as runner-up in Defensive Player of the Year voting, an achievement that, per Olympics.com, tied Manute Bol for the highest finish by a rookie in that award's history. Statistically, some measures put his debut season among the greatest ever recorded by a rookie. By some statistical measures, Wembanyama had the greatest rookie season in NBA history, with his combined total of 49.4 points, blocks, rebounds, assists and steals per 36 minutes the best mark for any first-year player, surpassing the previous record held by Spurs legend David Robinson. He became just the third Spur, after Robinson and Tim Duncan, to win the Rookie of the Year award, slotting him immediately into the franchise's lineage of transformative big men. This card captures him at the very start of that arc: a Panini Prizm Draft Picks rookie card, numbered as card 2, issued the year he was drafted first overall. The Choice Red Prizm is a parallel limited to a small print run within that set, one of the scarcer color variations chasing the base rookie image of a player who, before he ever played an NBA minute, was already being measured against the best debuts the league had ever seen.