To snap their first losing streak of the season, the Chicago Bulls have to unlock one of the most fascinating puzzles in the NBA — third-year center Victor Wembanyama.
It’s too early in the season to make definitive declarations. But after the center fell into a rut through the last four games, the Bulls might have a blueprint for success in Monday night’s game against the San Antonio Spurs.
In his first five games, Wembanyama posted the type of statistics that can drum up an MVP campaign after a single week of play: 30.2 points per game, 14.6 rebounds, 3.4 assists, 1.4 steals and 4.8 blocks. But that dominance didn’t last for long.
Over the past four games, Wembanyama’s production plummeted as teams adjusted to take the star out of the game — 17 points, 3 assists, 2.5 blocks and five turnovers per game. Wembanyama shot only 39.7% from the floor in that four-game span, partially after shooting 16.7% from behind the arc.
The Spurs went 2-2 in those games despite Wembanyama’s muted output, posting back-to-back wins over the Houston Rockets and the New Orleans Pelicans this weekend. But without that force acting as their anchor, the Spurs have been quickly defanged.
So what’s going on? Has the rest of the NBA hacked the Wembanyama problem? And can the Bulls replicate this solution?
There aren’t many factors connecting the defenses of the four teams — the Los Angeles Lakers, Phoenix Suns, Rockets and Pelicans — that effectively slowed Wembanyama. The Rockets post the seventh-best defensive rating in the league. The Pelicans have the third-worst. But all four teams followed the same general formula of blitzing the best player on the court.
Star players quickly become accustomed to the two-man traps that follow them around the court with dogged persistence. The choreography is almost ritualistic — star catches ball, off-ball help collapses, star splits the gap or slings a pass or takes a shot out of spite.
Defenses are taking this defensive design a step further to keep Wembanyama. It starts by ceding size. There isn’t a player long enough to counter Wembanyama. Instead, defenses are using a smaller, stouter player to hound the center by swiping at the ball and attacking the lower half of his center of gravity.
For the Bulls, this bill fits forward Isaac Okoro. At 6-foot-4 and 225 pounds, Okoro might not seem like the most obvious player to take on the 7-foot-5 Wembanyama. But the Bulls already deploy the small forward to guard star centers like Giannis Antetokounmpo, which allows longer wings like Matas Buzelis and centers like Nikola Vučević to rotate to contest with their length.
Okoro, for his part, is eager to take on this type of oversized defensive assignments.
“I’m comfortable guarding anyone,” Okoro said after Saturday’s loss to Milwaukee. “At the end of the day, I love guarding the best players in the league.”
Defenses help on almost all of Wembanyama’s drives. Houston fronted to deny him entry passes to the post, which almost entirely pulled San Antonio off the block. The Suns used a box zone to put multiple bodies on Wembanyama over the course of a single play, hitting him at the point of attack and again when he attempted to cut into the post.
These different approaches all had a similar outcome, reducing Wembanyama’s attempts at the rim and forcing him to take lower-efficiency jump shots or simply pass out of trouble. And this was especially effective because Wembanyama purposefully halved his production from behind the arc this season, averaging 3.8 attempts per game compared to 6.8 attempts per game in the first two seasons of his career.
Outside of his immense length and eye-popping athleticism, Wembanyama is perhaps most prized for his cerebral approach to basketball. Yet these swarms of attention succeeded in speeding the game up for the third-year center, who admitted to feeling rushed by double teams.
“Right now, it feels like the game is going fast, somehow,” Wembanyama said after a loss to the Lakers. “As we get better as a team and as we get better individually, it feels like the opponents have stepped up in some ways defensively. … The quickness at which the double comes is so much faster than in the past. It feels like teams are very prepared from previous schemes defensively coming into games against us.”
Taking Wembanyama out of the game could help the Bulls diffuse the Spurs’ greatest advantage — but they have to be careful.
At times, this fanatical focus on a single player can backfire on an offense. Buzelis noted this fallibility after the Bulls dropped a loss to the Milwaukee Bucks despite the team’s attempt to thwart Antetokounmpo with constant trapping.
“We just gave up easy buckets for the other players,” Buzelis said. “(Antetokounmpo) was obviously getting downhill, but the other players impacted the game and that’s how they got the win.”
And the Spurs field a formidable offsetting factor to Wembanyama — guard De’Aaron Fox, who played his first game Saturday after missing the start of the season with a hamstring injury.
The Spurs are already attempting to jailbreak Wembanyama by using him as a passing hub, which can exploit the mismatches and free players naturally created by a help-heavy defensive scheme. This effort is improved when the Spurs run cutters incessantly around their center — and Fox might be the deftest cutter in the entire league, a speedy guard whose off-ball movement can slice any defense into ribbons.
There isn’t an easy fix here. Throwing Wembanyama out of whack doesn’t guarantee a win. It also feels like the only option to put the Bulls in a position to win.
The chess game starts Monday night at the United Center.
