The NBA cleared him Sunday night. No suspension, no fine. Wembanyama would play Game 5.
There will be no further discipline for Spurs star Victor Wembanyama after he was ejected for elbowing Naz Reid in Minnesota on Sunday night, sources tell ESPN. No suspension, no fine. Wembanyama will play in Game 5 against the Timberwolves on Tuesday night in San Antonio. pic.twitter.com/GOGCbIcbQP
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) May 11, 2026
So the Timberwolves apparently decided that if the league wouldn’t punish him, they would. Ayo Dosunmu got in his face early. Rudy Gobert kept drifting into his landing zones. Naz Reid shoved him on a free throw attempt and caught a tech for his trouble. The whole thing read like a coordinated annoyance campaign — and Wembanyama saw it for exactly what it was. “I feel like the rage-baiting would have been maybe one of their strategies,” he said after the game. He said it calmly. Probably with the same face he made when Dosunmu walked up to him and Wemby just… smiled and kept playing.
Eighteen points in the first quarter. Eighteen. Six-of-eight shooting. The Timberwolves hadn’t even finished running their little psychological warfare playbook when the box score already looked like a crime scene.
Final: 126-97. Twenty-nine points. Gone.
Here’s what’s actually brutal about this, as a Wolves fan: the rage-baiting inference makes sense on paper. Get him rattled, get him ejected again, change the series. It worked once — sort of — in Game 4, when McDaniels hung off his arm in a double-team and the elbow caught Reid and the refs hit the Flagrant 2 button. The Wolves were down in that game anyway, but losing Wemby for the rest of it felt like leverage. Like a blueprint. So you try to replicate the conditions. You poke the bear.
The bear scored 18 points before the first timeout.
What’s genuinely hard to process is that Wemby is 22 years old and he named the strategy at his own press conference. Not to complain. Not to call anyone out. Just to say, calmly, “we need to stay composed as a team.” Like he’s already the veteran in the building. His coach called him “mature” four separate times. Anthony Edwards, who dropped 20 on 6-of-13 shooting, basically shrugged and admitted “you don’t really have too much of an answer for it. Just kind of hope he misses.”
That’s the answer. Hope he misses. That’s the gameplan.
The stat line he produced is the kind that makes the StatMuse account go temporarily unhinged:
Victor Wembanyama in Game 5:
27 PTS
17 REB
5 AST
3 BLKThe first player with a 25/15/5/3b playoff game since Lakers AD. pic.twitter.com/IVz2PQsh9t
— StatMuse (@statmuse) May 13, 2026
First player with a 25/15/5/3-block playoff game since Anthony Davis. In a first quarter where he put up 18 and 6, he joined LeBron James and Nikola Jokic as the only players in 30 years to hit those numbers in a playoff opening period. Chris Finch’s post-game admission — “we gave up 30 points in the last six minutes of the third quarter” — is almost secondary. The game was over before that. The game was over when Dosunmu walked up with trash talk and Wemby smiled like a guy who already knew what was about to happen.
Game 6 is tonight, in Minneapolis. Donte DiVincenzo is out. The Wolves win or the season dies.
If the plan is still “make him angry enough to do something stupid,” someone should pull up tonight’s box score from Game 5 and reconsider.
