Victor Wembanyama will not play for the rest of the regular season due to a deep vein thrombosis in his right shoulder, the Spurs announced Thursday. The team believes that the blood clot is an "isolated condition," per Shams Charania of ESPN.
Wembanyama was on court as recently as Sunday's All-Star Game, where he tried pretty hard, at least within the context of that game. The team said that the condition was discovered upon his return to San Antonio. Wembanyama had been feeling "low energy," and that feeling persisted throughout the All-Star break, which prompted the tests that uncovered the blood clot, according to Sam Amick of The Athletic. The Spurs are optimistic he'll return for the 2025-26 season, Tim MacMahon of ESPN reported, citing a team source.
The 21-year-old big man was more or less a lock for his first-ever Defensive Player of the Year award and an All-NBA selection. By ending this season with just 46 games played, he will fall short of the 65-game minimum for both awards. Wembanyama, who played 71 games in his rookie season, had missed just six games thus far in his sophomore campaign. A 2017 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis concluded that taller height is a risk factor for venous thromboembolism. (That's a more general term for blood clotting in veins, which includes Wembanyama's specific diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis.) In 2016, Chris Bosh's NBA career was ended by recurring blood clots.
The Spurs currently stand at 23-29, which is 12th in the West and 3.5 games back from a play-in berth. Ahead of the trade deadline, they grabbed point guard De'Aaron Fox from the Kings as a co-star for Wembanyama.
