Photo by Jim Poorten/NBAE via Getty Images
Wembanyama is the NBA’s newest game-changer.
You get a surreal sensation when witnessing something you’ve truly never seen before. It’s simultaneously awe-inducing and confounding, tearing apart our expectations and asking us to process how to make sense of what we’ve witnessed. Never before have we seen anyone in the NBA like the San Antonio Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, and despite being a rookie with fewer than 20 games under his belt, the 19-year-old Frenchman is already changing the game in the NBA.
A common phrase surrounding athletes is “unicorn.” A term for someone who possesses natural abilities that are rare. Wembanyama is a unicorn in the truest sense of the world, a mythical creature impossible to believe exists until you witness him with your eyes. The seven-foot-four phenom has a wingspan that measures eight feet, yet moves with the grace of a guard. He can soar over the basket to make dunks that are impossible to contend, while simultaneously shooting from the outside like a wing. Wembanyama can stuff big men in the paint, or use his length to disrupt shots from the perimeter. The 19-year-old is a human cheat code, seemingly created in a lab, and previously only seen as a create-a-character in video games.
The No. 1 overall pick in the 2023 NBA Draft is already taking the NBA by storm. This season he’s averaging 19.2 points, and 9.5 rebounds, which is impressive enough on its own — but it’s more about how much he’s altering the game of basketball in the process. In isolation there isn’t anything Wembanyama is doing that we haven’t seen before. The NBA had had graceful finishers near the rim like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Big men with shooting touch like Dirk Nowitzki. Lengthy transition athletes like Giannis Antetokounmpo. The problem for the rest of the NBA is that Victor Wembanyama combines all these traits and rolls them into a single athlete.
How to do defend someone with that skillset? That’s not a rhetorical question. The league is yet to devise an answer for someone with Wemby’s range of abilities crammed in a body that towers over even most big men. The rookie is able to handle being out-muscled in the paint with his midrange game, his ball handling is good enough that smaller guards can’t pick his pocket, and outside of setting a permanent double-team on him there’s no good answer — an even then it lifts the players around Wembanyama.
That’s part of what makes this so fun. He is grace and elegance put in a body that traditionally houses neither — and a huge factor in that comes from Wembanyama’s literal DNA. His mother, Elodie de Fautereau (6’3) is a former French basketball player and coach who nurtured her son’s interest in the sport. His father, Félix Wembanyama (6’6) was a Congolese track and field athlete, who specialized in high jump, long jump, and triple jump. Victor inherited not just height from his parents, but coordination — and perhaps most importantly was allowed to find his way to basketball, rather than being pushed into it.
History is littered with players who were pressured into a game by the parents because of physical traits, but the Wembanyama family freely allowed Victor to explore playing soccer and competing in judo before he discovered that basketball was his love. This not only makes him an unreal, multi-faceted athlete — but grounded him a way that better prepared him for the pressure of playing in the NBA.
It’s not often we get to see someone as truly unreal as Victor Wembanyama. Athletically and physically it’s the closest we’ve come to Bo Jackson this millennium. A player who doesn’t just inspire imagination, but myth. The difference is that many of the tall tales about Jackson were not recorded and remain only in oral history, while every night we continue to be amazed by the acts of this literal teenager, who might remain in the shadow of Spurs’ greats like David Robinson and Tim Duncan, but will have a chance to eclipse two Hall of Famers during his career.
This is Victor Wembanyama, and he is truly changing the game of basketball in a way we’ve never witnessed before.
