THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
How certain was it that 19 year old French basketball star Victor Wembanyama would be chosen first in the 2023 NBA Draft? Well, one prominent sportsbook publicized taking a bet of $60,000 that he would, at odds of -20,000 (which translates into 1/200). Which meant that when the San Antonio Spurs duly made Victor their pick, his payoff was $300. Pretty soon bookies were restricting bets to $6,250, which offered bettors a profit of $31.25.
Which is a lot less money than Wembanyama will make, whether he's a sure thing or not. What makes the teenager so valuable?
Start with his height. It’s been listed as anything from 2.18m (7-2) to 2.26m (7-5) depending on whether he's in sneakers, if his hair's been cut, what time he woke up or who's measuring. His wingspan is a remarkable eight feet. These are attributes you can't coach. He's also rail-thin, originally listed at 209 lbs - he suddenly became 230 for the draft, which no one believed. But he has wiry muscle, and the coordination of a much smaller player. He can handle the ball, he can shoot from the 3-point line, make space inside, and has the vision to see opportunities to pass the ball. He has an obvious feel for the game.
‘Wemby’ has been playing professionally in France for four years, against grown men, starting aged 15 with Nanterre then with ASVEL in Lyon. After an injury-plagued season in 2021-22, he moved to Metropolitans 92 in the Paris suburb of Levallois-Perret. The move paid off: this season he was MVP of the All-Star game, Elite League MVP, and MVP of the playoffs as Metro won the French title.
In December, Metropolitans went to Las Vegas to play two games against the NBA G-League's Ignite team. Formerly the D (for Development) League, the G League is named for its sponsor, Gatorade (this is the NBA after all), and the Ignite team includes younger players not yet signed by NBA clubs. Their star, Scoot Henderson, was reckoned to be Victor's competition for the number one draft pick, but Scoot is a 6-3 point guard. In the first game, Scoot scored 28 points with nine assists as Ignite won, but he got hurt in a clash of knees with Wembanyama early in the second game, and the French duly triumphed to split the series. Meanwhile Victor scored 37 and 36 points and blocked nine shots. In the first game he drilled seven three-point baskets, in the second he auditioned his inside game, for which Ignite had not prepared.
NBA stars flocked to Vegas to watch, although the game was televised nationally. When LeBron James was asked if he thought Wembanyama was a “unicorn”, the word denoting a unique prospect, he said he'd seen too many players called unicorns. “Victor's more like an alien,” he explained. “No one's ever seen anyone as tall as he is, but as fluid and graceful out on the floor.” In fact, Victor was the most-highly hyped prospect since, well, Le Bron! Stef Curry laughed, “He's every point guard that wants to be seven feet tall. It's cheat-code type vibes!”
Wembanyama comes from a rare athletic background. His father Felix, who stands 6-5, was born in the Congo where he was a high, long and triple jumper. He came to France to study and met Victor's mother Elodie de Fautereau, who's 6-3 and a professional basketball player who now coaches; both her parents also played and coached. Victor's older sister Eve is 6-0, played for France under-16 and now plays in the French Ligue 2 with Monaco. His younger brother Oscar stands ‘only’ 6-5, but is following in Victor's footsteps, first playing with Nanterre and recently moving to ASVAL. In photos, Victor towers over the rest of this unusually tall family.
Their experience also seems to have shaped Victor's unusual maturity. At Metropolitans he was coached by former French star Vincent Collet, who helped him fit into a team concept. He had a personal trainer to help him with foot injuries, something that can ruin careers when you're around seven feet tall with size 21 shoes - think about Bill Walton or Kevin McHale - and with ancillary issues like diet and sleep. He already has a team of agents and managers to oversee contracts and the inevitable endorsements that will follow.
San Antonio is a great place for Victor in basketball terms. Greg Popovich is their coach and president, and at 74 just signed a five-year deal to continue in that role. 'Pops' is a great builder of team concepts, and has done so with overseas players including France's Tony Parker. In fact, he and his disciples, like Steve Kerr, have been at the forefront of adapting the principles of the European game to the NBA. These changes are predominately the effect of the three point shot which FIBA, the international basketball federation, started using in 1961, the same year the upstart American Basketball League, which lasted only a season and half, did the same. In 1967, the next competing league, the American Basketball Association (ABA), used the 3 point circle, but when it merged with the National Basketball Association in 1976 it took another three seasons before the NBA went downtown. They didn't adapt the red, white and blue basketball, however.
NBA teams were basically constructed 1 through 5: 1 (point guard), 2 (shooting guard) 3 (small forward) 4 (power forward) 5 (center), which reflected the importance of the inside game, the easier shots for two points. But European teams became structured with (simplified) two bigs, two wings, and a point guard - opening up the court for three pointers. They did the math. If you shoot 40% on threes, and take ten shots, you get twelve points. If you take ten two-point shots you need to shoot 60% to get twelve points, and few big men, even in close, shoot in the 60s. Therefore, at least one of a team's two bigs tended to be someone who could shoot outside (in NBA terms a “stretch four” - the NBA’s prototype is 6-11 Kevin Durant, to whom Wemby is frequently compared: Durant's tall, thin but very long-limbed, which allows him to defend bigger or stronger men with his reach, and he’s a deadly three-point shooter).
For those of us old enough to remember, Victor should have reminded LeBron or Stef of Ralph Sampson, the 7-5 center from Virginia who went to the NBA's Houston Rockets in 1983, where he wound up as one of the “twin towers” alongside Hakeem Olajuwon. Sampson was a ball-handling guard trapped in an NBA which insisted he be a 4 or a 5; he lacked the outside shooting to be anything else. In Europe, outside shooting bigs opened up defenses, allowing teams to penetrate the middle without having great athletes, hence the famous 'Euro-step', a form of legalised traveling that gives a third step without a dribble.
The real prototype Victor was Krešimir Ćosić, a 6-11 Croatian-Yugoslavian center who somehow got to Brigham Young in 1969, recommended by a Finnish summer league teammate who was already there. Ćosić became a two-time All-American, the first foreigner so honored, averaging over 20 points and more than 10 rebounds per game. But it was his ball-handling and outside shooting that wowed American crowds. It wasn't that earlier greats like Bill Russell or Wilt Chamberlain couldn't handle the ball; they could, but rarely had to, and they were never asked to shoot outside. With the FIBA 3-point line only 20 feet 6 inches back then, Ćosić grew up shooting from the outside. He was drafted twice by the NBA, by Portland after his junior year, then the Lakers in 1973's round 5 - that late partly because they couldn't figure out he'd fit, and partly because he wasn't likely to play professionally in America. He went back to his team, Zadar, in Croatia, and later played in Greece and Italy.
Nowadays FIBA's 3-point circle is 22 feet 2 inches, while the NCAA's is only 20' 9” and the NBA's is a more demanding 23' 9” so international players have a smaller jump to be effective shooting when they go to the NBA. And now the influence of overseas players is immense. Last season the league boasted 120 non-American players, from 40 countries. The most, 23, were Canadian; France and Australia were next with nine each. Basketball exploded in France after Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls played in the McDonald's tournament in Paris in 1997, but part of the NBA lure is that players in the more traditional Euro powers, Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Russia and Lithuania, can often do better staying at home. And now with no big pro leagues at home, the best African players head for Europe or the US anyway.
Last season's NBA MVP was Joel Embiid, from Cameroon via France. The real MVP (and playoff MVP) was Serbian Nikola Jokić, not drafted until round 2 in 2014. Others on the All-Star team include Slovenia's Luka Dončić (the breakup of Yugoslavia turned one powerhouse international team into a handful of very good ones), Giannis Antetokounmpo from Greece and Canada's Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.
After Wembanyama went number one, Brandon Miller of Alabama went second; Charlotte didn't need a point guard, so Scoot Handerson fell to Portland with the third pick. The next two picks were the identical twins Amen and Ausar Thompson, both of whom played for Overtime Elite, a self-contained eight team league in Atlanta that is accredited as a high school, but unlike prep schools and academies like IMG, pays its players. Amen went at No. 4 to the Houston Rockets, Ausar to the Detroit Pistons at No. 5.
I wrote a column about UConn winning the NCAA title a few months ago, pointing out the alternate routes to the NBA besides US colleges: all five of the US college players who went in the draft's top ten picks were 'one and done' freshmen, three of whom had attended multiple finishing schools. The only other non-American in the top ten was Wemby's Metropolitans teammate Bilal Coulibaly, a 6-8 forward. Three other foreign players were drafted in the second round of the draft, including two teammates of Henderson's from Ignite: Canada's Leonard Miller, New Zealand's Mojave King, and Sidy Cissoko, a 6-4 French guard who also went to San Antonio. The latter's talent has been compared to Argentina's Manu Ginóbili, who starred for the Spurs; but Cissoko will also be able to speak French with Wemby when he's homesick.
Not that Wembanyama will need help. He's well-spoken (in English as well as French) and seemingly mature for 19, as he showed at draft day. And then three weeks later, again in Las Vegas, where he made what the press hyped up as his "Spurs' debut" in the Summer League. That’s where draft picks and free agents compete to impress the teams with which they've signed. There's not a ton of coaching, it's more a showcase for individual talent. And after that first game on a Friday night, Wemby was declared a failure by the internet herd, as he scored only nine points, shooting only two for 13 from the field, including missing five straight threes, and committing three turnovers. No one seemed to notice but he also blocked six shots. After the game,Victor told the press “I didn't really know what I was doing out there.” Maybe the hype and the constant appearances (he even threw out a first pitch at Yankee Stadium before the draft) had been too much.
But the big media story came after the game, when pop diva Mariah Carey tried to get his attention by grabbing his arm as he walked past. The Spurs' chief security man pulled her hand off Victor, who walked on unaware, and the internet exploded. Although Victor apparently apologized, Carey announced she needed a public apology, saying (without any irony) that she urged people in the public eye to “treat all people with respect”, even when they, like Carey, don't do the same to them.
On Saturday, rather than attend the Summer League players party, rife with NBA stars and Vegas celebs, Wembanyama decided he needed to rest for his second game on Sunday. He came out and scored 27 points, grabbed 12 rebounds and blocked three more shots. Jerry West called him “a bigger Bill Russell”, explaining how Wembanyama, like Russell, used his sense of the game to block shots unexpectedly, something his long reach made easier.
It was a perceptive comment from West, one of the greatest players and smartest minds in basketball. San Antonio decided at that point to shut down Victor for the rest of the summer; they'd seen enough from his one-game adjustment to a new setting to feel confident in his future adjustment to the NBA grind. And thinking about what West said, it may just be possible that the Spurs got more than just a star in the draft. They may have opened the door on a new style and new era in basketball, beyond the NBA.
