The San Antonio Spurs are bringing rookie Victor Wembanyama along slowly, despite his stellar production and massive potential.

The Spurs rookie is also highly intelligent, according to Sean Elliott and Jordan Howenstine via Bleacher Report:

“Victor is one of the two smartest teenagers I’ve seen play the game,” said former Spurs All-Star Sean Elliott, whose work as an analyst on the team’s locally produced telecasts has provided a bird’s-eye view of all the young phenoms who have entered the league since his career ended in 2001. “Of course, the other one would be LeBron James. Those two come to mind immediately. And, I have to say Victor has a higher basketball IQ than Kobe (Bryant) had at the same age.

“Victor’s a very intelligent person, period. He loves to read in his time off. You usually get young players doing the video game thing in their time off. So, he’s already a very intelligent and focused young man.”

So focused is Wembanyama on his health and well-being that Spurs staffers are advised never to phone him at his home after 9:30 p.m., according to Spurs director of basketball communications Jordan Howenstine.

“That’s when he reads for an hour,” Howenstine explained. “Then he goes to sleep.”

Spurs coach Gregg Popovich spoke about the plan for coaching Wemby earlier this week:

“With Wemby, it's watching him. That's what we did. I told our local guys for the first 15, 20, 25 games we're just going to let him play. I mean, if he takes some ridiculous shot, we're going to coach, but, in general, see where he ends up.”

Offensively, Wembanyama is averaging 20.3 points per game on 46.4 percent field goal shooting. He's also averaging 10.0 rebounds and 3.2 blocks per game.