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7 hours ago
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The NBA season began with serious questions about Victor Wembanyama’s ability to last the distance in the playoffs. Could this brilliant ectomorph, a blend of rare height and even rarer skill, stand up to the rigors of a deep postseason run? Would his slim body snap under the intensity of professional basketball’s sternest tests? The results are in: Wembanyama will this week lead the San Antonio Spurs in the NBA finals. At just 22 years of age, basketball’s next superstar has arrived: slightly ahead of schedule, but with every part of his brilliance emphatically affirmed.
“Wemby” landed in America as the NBA’s No 1 overall draft pick in 2023, an alien in both stature (his official height is listed as 7ft 4in, though many claim he may be as tall as 7ft 6in), nationality (French), and foreign-language proficiency (fluent in English, despite never having lived outside his home country). Sure enough, “The Alien” quickly became his nickname. But the flood of tears with which he greeted his team’s defeat of Oklahoma City in Saturday night’s Game 7 of the Western Conference finals revealed a different side to this outlier of outliers: the human side. More than his freakish physique or the sheer absurdity of the spectacle he presents on court, towering over established giants of the game like some basketballing Burj Khalifa, it’s Wemby’s humanity that makes him such a compulsively interesting and watchable star. He is the alien who longs to be among us.
This is the man, let’s not forget, who loves chess and reading and last summer spent two weeks training with Shaolin monks in China to improve his mental resilience. As a 14-year-old, he had the confidence to turn down an offer to join Barcelona permanently after a guest stint with the club because the coaches there did not challenge him enough. As a 22-year-old, living in the US without American citizenship, he was brave enough to publicly condemn the killing of two civilians by ICE agents in Minneapolis. For Wembanyama, such demonstrations of character and principle are now routine.
Even on less fraught questions his perspective is considered and mature. At a press conference before this year’s playoffs, the extra-terrestre (as I was recently disappointed to discover his native public does not in fact call him) was asked for his thoughts on the 65-game rule, which stipulates the minimum number of appearances a player must make in a season to be eligible for the major annual awards. He first asked reporters for their own thoughts on the matter, then rattled off a considered take that included a number of instant mental calculations (50 x 35, 75 x 20) that would have had most of us reaching for a calculator. It was textbook Wembanyama, combining sympathy for the downtrodden (journalists) with mental agility – a performance as thoughtful as it was gently articulated. Wembanyama is a center, he is a shot-blocker, he is a monster under the glass, he is a lethal shooter from distance, yes. But before he is all of that he is a man of deep thought and feeling, and it’s that mixture of uncommon height, uncommon ability, and uncommon intellect, both on the court and off it, that makes him unique.
A sense of being out of scale to the rest of humanity has followed Wembanyama, seemingly, since he emerged from the womb: he was already 6ft 3in by the age of 11, a concept that feels ridiculous even to commit to words, much less experience as a daily reality. But his game does not rely on height alone, but on mastery of all the things that players in the altitudes below 7ft use to stand out on the basketball court: dribbling, ball carrying, shooting, passing. In previous decades, a giant of Wemby’s dimensions might have had a predictable career: like Shaq and Yao Ming and countless other bigs before him, he probably would have bulked up and turned himself into a human battering ram, ready for deployment in largely immobile and unimaginative fashion under the basket.
But Wembanyama has not gone the way of these muscled hunks. His thoughtfulness and competitive spirit have compelled him to reach beyond the gifts of his own height and become the complete player, at both ends of the court. He is perhaps basketball’s first asymptotic player: his talent, like his height, seems to stretch to infinity. Mobility is his great strength: mobility on the court, yes, but a basic restlessness as well, a refusal to rely on size alone. The game has changed too, as has the surrounding culture: basketball’s giants are now asked to do more than simply wait for the ball under the ring and dunk, and corporeal fashion has moved away from bodybuilders’ frames toward more streamlined forms. Even the burgers are skinny now. Wembanyama has come along at exactly the right moment to tap these fluctuations in the zeitgeist. As slight as spaghettini and as strong as wire rope, this whip of a man is the perfect ball-handling center for the Ozempic era, a slender hero for our slender times.
Showcasing both the offensive variety of a point guard and the defensive heft of a grizzled big, Wembanyama was at his best in the recent series against the Thunder, in which he deployed his full arsenal of tricks. There were spins, step-backs, pump-fakes, businesslike mid-range jump shots, three pointers from 30ft, and croissant-light lobs. There were rebounds snapped up with the biomechanical force of a hippopotamus bite. And there were blocks, many blocks: shots pummeled back into the floorboards, threes sabotaged by the brush of fingertips, layups matter-of-factly thwarted on their ascent to the glass. For Wembanyama, blocking seems to come as easily as breathing, an automatism that’s a natural part of living with long limbs; the moment the ball is in his opponent’s hand, he’s a Giacometti come thrillingly to life, grim and implacable and impossibly tall.
You want speed? Wembanyama has that too, and at a level that’s frankly absurd for a man who has to duck under every door he passes through. Under the basket, Wemby is a blur of movement and angles, limbs flying like bean sprouts at the teppanyaki counter. But in transition he becomes something else, a symphony of woodwinds jazzing across the floor. Pass him the ball if you’re on offense and he may pull up for one of those Durant-like threes, dead-eyeing the basket from distance then launching the ball toward its destiny in an arc as flat as Mike Tirico’s vocal range. Try to evade him if you’re his opponent and you’ll hear the pelican roar as he chases you down, a terrifying prospect on the court but a joy to witness from afar. There’s something quite wonderful about watching a 7ft 4in athlete sprinting the length of the court and launching himself at an opponent attempting a corner three like a kamikaze Concorde; more athletes should be 7ft 4in and try it.
For years this sport of extremes has teased the question: what if there was a player who was both exceptionally tall and exceptionally good at everything? Now we have our answer. Basketball has never seen a player like this, and may never see one again. Let us savor Wembanyama for what he is – not an alien, but the human in excelsis.
