There are certain moments from my past—times that I did something embarrassing, times that I said the wrong thing, times that I hurt someone's feelings—that cause an actual, physical reaction whenever they resurface in my mind. My face gets hot, a lump travels from my throat down to my stomach, and I need to blink my eyes or ball my fists a few times in order to banish the memory. It's maybe too much to say that I am haunted by these memories, but, well, there they always are.
Insanely, I have started to develop a similar physiological reaction to highlights of Victor Wembanyama playing basketball. Throughout the first half of the season, I found myself charmed and even delighted by the things that I saw the 7-foot-5 Frenchman do on the basketball court. The parade of blocked shots made me smile; the alley-oops that were dunked home while his feet barely left the ground amused me; those moments when his arms would stretch and stretch and stretch and turn what should have been a contested layup into a dunk were good, clean fun. But something has changed since around the all-star break. In the last few weeks it has become clear to me, and everyone else, that Victor Wembanyama is not a supreme basketball talent because he's 7-foot-5, but a supreme basketball talent who just so happens to be 7-foot-5.
There's a play from a game Wembanyama played against the Knicks last week that I can't get out of my head. He scored 40 points, grabbed 20 rebounds, and dished seven assists in that game, which the Spurs won in overtime. The play in question came with just over a minute left in the overtime period. With seven seconds left on the shot clock, Wemby caught the ball above the free-throw line and executed a quick dribble-handoff with Devin Vassell. The Knicks saw it coming, and quickly cut off Vassell's driving lane, leaving him no choice but to make a jump pass back out to Wemby, who was now standing beyond the three-point line on the left wing. Vassell sprinted after his own pass to set a screen on Wemby's defender. The big Frenchman saw this coming, took one smooth dribble to his right to take advantage of Vassell's screen, and then pulled up for a straight-on three-pointer with just over a second left on the shot clock. He hit it, and put the Spurs up by four.
The clammy, panicked feeling that play gives me is down to the fact that it is, while relatively simple, the kind of play I am used to seeing players with a real feel for the game making. There are certain players who just seem to know how to ride the rhythm of a given possession, who never panic, who always know what their next move is going to be. Put aside the fact that it's strange to see a 7-foot-5 guy navigate the final seven seconds of a clutch possession with all the liquid confidence of Kevin Durant, and just think about how rare it is for a 20-year-old rookie, of any size, to be so surefooted in a game like that.
Wembanyama has been making a lot of these sorts of plays lately, and they have filled my head with dark thoughts about the future. All those extraterrestrial buckets and blocks that Wembanyama was collecting at the beginning of the season by simply stretching his arms in the right directions form only the trunk of his skill tree. The branches have started to grow, and it is on those branches that you will find rhythm jumpers, unstoppable isolation drives, inverted pick and rolls, and self-directed fast breaks that end with perfect passes fired from the free-throw line to the corner at a dead sprint. These are the branches that will grow, and eventually block out the sun.
Anyway, the Spurs played the Denver Nuggets last night. The Nuggets are the reigning NBA champions, Nikola Jokic is in all likelihood going to win his third MVP award this year, and I am meant to be living through the best years of my life as a sports fan, anticipating several more trips to the NBA Finals and maybe even another parade or two. I'm not so sure that's going to happen anymore.
The Nuggets were without Jamal Murray, but the Spurs were without three of their best players in Vassell, Jeremy Sochan, and Keldon Johnson. There were men named Blake Wesley and Sandro Mamukelashvili playing serious minutes in this game. Jokic went for 42-16-6, and the Nuggets barely won the game, 110-105. And get this: Wembanyama played awful. He missed just about every jumper he took, his post-ups went nowhere, and he routinely blew layups at the rim. And yet he finished the game with 23 points, 15 rebounds, eight assists, and nine blocks. If these are the kind of numbers he can stumble into as a rookie while playing quite poorly, what's it going to look like when those new branches get sturdier? What happens when he learns better footwork in the post, when his jumper gets more reliable, and when he's passing the ball to guys who actually have a Basketball Reference page? Without any of that, he still almost snatched a game from the defending NBA champions. More worryingly, every minute he was on the floor felt like a minute in which the Spurs, an 18-58 team with hardly any NBA-quality players at its disposal, had the advantage.
I suppose I should be thankful that the Nuggets already won their title, and that I am not a Thunder or a Timberwolves fan. Because I am pretty certain that Victor Wembanyama is coming to take everything, from all of us.
