Victor Wembanyama, the biggest promise in NBA basketball since LeBron James

Loading player

The annual lottery preceding the NBA draft, the process by which the North American professional basketball league selects players from school leagues or overseas, was held Tuesday night in Chicago. The lottery defines the order in which the teams that have not qualified for the playoffs will choose the best players available: this year it was particularly anticipated because among the players who will enter the NBA next season there is the Frenchman Victor Wembanyama.

Wembanyama is 19 years old, at least 221 centimeters tall (225 according to US measurements), has body control, fluidity of movement and shooting and passing technical skills practically unseen in players of that height. According to the opinion of almost all experts and insiders, he is the best player to enter the NBA since LeBron James (2003). In the United States, and elsewhere, he is defined as a “generational talent”, that is, capable of influencing the professional league for a generation, as LeBron James did.

The lottery was won by the San Antonio Spurs, a team that won five championships between 1999 and 2014, which played in the playoffs for 22 consecutive seasons between 1998 and 2019, but which has closed with very negative results for four years, the result of a process of “reconstruction” – as it is called in American sports – which passes from the training of young players and from the renunciation of obtaining immediate results.

Expectations on Wembanyama are very high at every level: fans, players, pundits and team managers. One of the latter a few months ago said anonymously that he was ready to choose French with call number 1 «even if he broke both his legs». After winning the lottery, Spurs general manager Brian Wright said: “It’s an incredible day for us – you watch him and see him accomplish things you couldn’t even imagine anyone could do. And then he has the right approach, he’s professional, he’s unique in many aspects, and not just on the pitch ».

The NBA has made a ranking of the players whose videos have had the most views on its social channels in the last year: Wembanyama is eighth, despite not having played a minute yet in the championship.

Adrian Wojnarowski, who works for ESPN and is considered the top expert on the North American basketball market, defined Wembanyama as “perhaps the best promise in the history of team sports”.

In action with the Boulogne-Levallois team (AP Photo/Michel Euler)

The best players in the league have often expressed a mixture of amazement and anticipation when speaking of French.

Steph Curry, who was a four-time NBA champion and two-time regular season MVP (best player), said: “He looks like a player created in video games using cheat codes: a point guard that height…”. Kevin Durant, one of the champions Wembanyama said he was inspired by, said: «Everyone will have problems when he arrives. The evolution of the game has brought us to this point: we have a boy of 2.25 who can do everything on the pitch». Damian Lillard, long a top player and scorer in the league, now 32, said: “I’m glad I won’t be staying in his own league for long.” LeBron James summed up: «He Looks like an alien».

Wembanyama, also known as Wemby, has played the last two seasons in the French league: he finished the last one with 22 points, 11 rebounds and three blocks per game, leading the statistical charts in all three categories. He will play the playoffs with Boulogne-Levallois Metropolitans 92, a team with little tradition and not particularly successful chosen last year to prepare the player’s entry into the NBA. The team is built around him, who also had a say on the coach and teammates: he finished the regular season in second place.

In October, the French team was invited to the United States for two exhibition games against a team from a minor league connected to the NBA, the G League, made up mostly of young people who would like to join the NBA: Wemby scored 36 and 37 points in the two games, making 7 of 11 three-point shots attempted and 5 blocks in the second. Those two matches convinced everyone that the viral footage of him playing in France or training against Rudy Gobert, one of the best defenders in the league, was not deceiving.

Nineteen-year-old Wembanyama grew up in a sports family in a Parisian suburb, Le Chesnay. The mother Elodie and the maternal grandfather Michel De Fautereau were high-level basketball players, the father Felix was a jumper (high, long, triple). Both parents are over 190 centimeters tall, a Congolese great-grandfather would have been over 2 meters tall, but there is no certainty about this. Since he was a boy, Wembanyama was considerably taller than his peers, as well as the two-year-old boys he played basketball against: on social networks there are Photo in which he looks like a man among children.

Despite his unusual physical means, Wembanyama has always trained not as a classic center, to take advantage of that advantage, but as a playmaker, a role usually played by shorter players, who are often faster and more agile: this has contributed to build a player who can defend the area thanks to very long arms, who dunks without apparent difficulty but who also knows how to dribble like a point guard and effectively shoot from three points.

The ability to release the ball during the shooting movement over the opponents head makes him potentially unstoppable. Lateral mobility and body balance, which he always maintains, are atypical characteristics for such a tall player.

Wembanyama has been preparing to enter the NBA since he was 14, he studied English from an early age because “it is the language of basketball” and in a recent interview he said: “I was born with the will to do things differently, in a mine, and I’m happy I kept that willpower, that I didn’t get pigeonholed by some coach. It was a daily battle.”

To find terms of comparison, experts often bring together different characteristics of some of the best players of the past: they say that Wembanyama has the defensive skills of Rudy Gobert, a compatriot elected the best defender in the league on several occasions; the control of the body of Dirk Nowitzki, a German player among the best scorers ever in the NBA; the shooting fluidity of Kevin Durant, one of the best players of recent years.

Barring unforeseen unforeseen events, Wembanyama will be selected with the first call by the Spurs and seems destined to change the near future of the team, as did the last two players chosen by San Antonio with the first call, David Robinson in 1987 and Tim Duncan in 1997. Spurs have a long history of success with non-US players, starting with Frenchman Tony Parker and Argentinean Manu Ginobili, even in times when relying on “internationals” was less common than today. Since 1996 they have had the same coach, Gregg Popovich, one of the most experienced and successful in the NBA.

The 19-year-old Frenchman in defensive action (AP Photo/Bob Edme)

San Antonio therefore seems like a perfect destination for Wembanyama, but probably each of the 14 teams present in the lottery would have been, so much so that in recent months the leaders of the professional league had had to monitor the regularity of the championship, with some teams accused of losing “voluntarily” for more chances to win the lottery and French rights.

American executives and experts in the past had expressed doubts about players from Europe: Slovenian Luka Doncic was chosen only with the number 3 call in 2018, despite being one of the most successful young players in recent years. There is no mistrust for Wembanyama and the consensus on the fact that he is the best player available in this draft is almost unanimous.

Faced with a player who apparently has no technical, aptitude or athletic limits, the only fears concern injuries. Players this tall have often had foot or ankle problems in the past: this is the case of the Chinese Yao Ming, forced to retire early in 2011, or Chet Holmgren, chosen with the number 2 call last year and who missed out with an injury all season. Center Greg Oden and forward Zion Williamson are two other players considered to be big promises at the time of entering the NBA blocked or at least slowed down (Williamson is only 22 years old) by injuries.

However, Wembanyama also seems particularly attentive to taking care of his body: his mother said that since he was a child the family has worked on his nutrition and physical preparation.