SAN ANTONIO, Texas — The most fun thing about Victor Wembanyama – besides watching him – is swimming in the idea that anything is possible. The San Antonio Spurs star is the human embodiment of what Kevin Garnett was shouting to the rafters after he led the Boston Celtics to his only NBA title back in 2008.
No projections seem too outlandish. Anywhere your imagination goes, his game could conceivably follow. Imagine if Kareem Abdul-Jabbar – one of the top-three players of all time, and until last season the NBA’s all-time leading scorer – was a couple of inches taller, could run like a deer, dribble like a point guard and bang threes from a couple of steps over centre?
So, yeah, in sum: Victor Wembanyama is like Abdul-Jabbar, see, but taller and more skilled than the six-time MVP.
It’s possible, for example, that Wembanyama will be a better NBA player than the aforementioned Garnett. It’s absurd on the face of it. The 19-year-old from France will be playing his sixth NBA game on Sunday afternoon when the Toronto Raptors get to see him up close for the first time.
Meanwhile, Garnett – who came into the NBA as a skinny, tall, multi-talented 19-year-old who could seemingly play as a point guard or a center or anything else in between – played 21 seasons, was all-NBA nine times, all-defence 12 times, and won the MVP award in 2004.
But you’d have a harder time arguing that the 7-foot-4 Wembanyama won’t be at least as good as peak Garnett than that he won’t be. Again, he can do anything Garnett did defensively and likely more, given his size, and offensively his toolbox is more varied.
What about Kevin Durant? The Slim Reaper is a two-time champion, former MVP and is widely acknowledged as the best pure scorer of his generation. In terms of their skills, body type and mobility, Durant is the player Wembanyama gets compared to most often.
Toronto Raptors veteran Thad Young went 12th overall in 2007, the same draft class where Durant went second overall, behind Greg Oden, a promising big man whose career was derailed by injuries almost before it ever got started. Young had played against Durant on the AAU circuit when they were growing up. He knew the Phoenix Suns star, who has led the NBA in scoring four times and has the highest per-game average of any active player, was special the first time he saw him.
“It was just his ability to score the basketball, to be a major impact not just being in the post but being around the three-point line,” said Young, who is in his 17th NBA season. “Back then, it wasn’t too many guys able to be 6-9, 6-10, 6-11 handling the basketball and doing what he was doing.
[Durant is] one of the true pioneers of the game, to help kind of change it.”
Wembanyama, against all common sense, seems like he could change it again. The Durant comparisons keep coming up because Wembanyama is similarly slim and lanky, yet moves with the grace and quickness of a player a foot shorter. Durant dominates because no one before him melded his shooting and ball-handling with his height and length.
But what if Durant was five or six inches taller?
“We’re gonna see that [Sunday],” said Young. “Obviously KD’s a special talent, once-in-a-generation type talent, we only see so many of those that come around … so when you see Wemby, 7-6 or 7-5 and able to handle the ball, make jumpers, change the game just not from the defensive side but from the offensive side as well. It’s definitely going to be interesting, this is going to be my first time seeing him in person, just watching him on the tube, it’s like, oh, it’s crazy.”
Is it reasonable to believe Wembanyama could one day be mentioned in the same breath as the sure-fire hall-of-famer Young grew up competing against?
Why not?
“I was watching Phoenix vs. San Antonio and I know how big Durant is,” said Raptors head coach Darko Rajakovic who was an assistant coach in Oklahoma City during Durant’s last two seasons with the Thunder. “[Durant] is a legit 7-footer. They list him at 6-foot-10, but he’s seven feet tall and he looked so tiny, compared to Wembanyama. [Wembanyama] is an avatar version of Kevin Durant.”
But that’s just his offensive impact which – to be fair – is still developing. Wembanyama certainly looks like he’ll be able to rise up and get jumpers at will and he looks like he’ll be able to knock down threes over any defender and he looks like he’ll be able to handle to ball and move around the floor in a way that makes the normal geometry of the game obsolete. But it could take a while before he masters it all.
The scouting reports, which could ultimately contain volumes, or maybe just one word – “help” – are still in paragraph form for now.
“He’s such a unique talent. He’s something this league hasn’t seen before,” said Rajakovic after the Raptors practiced Saturday. “I was talking with friends from the Spurs and they said they knew how talented he was, but they didn’t know how humble he is as a person, how hard-working, he’s got a great family. They’re really, really raving about him. He’s somebody that’s going to be dominating in this league for many years to come. We’re going to be learning for years all the coverages he’s going to need, everything you’re going to need to do slow him down.”
After all, LeBron James – perhaps the only player who has arrived in the NBA with as many expectations as Wembanyama – only averaged 20.9 points a game on 41.7 per cent shooting as a teenager, straight from high school. By his second season, James – still 19 when it started – was up to 27.2 points a game (along with 7.4 rebounds and 7.2 assists) on 47.2 per cent shooting and he was off. He was an all-NBA in his second season and is regarded now, in his 21st season, rivalled only by Michael Jordan as the best player of all time.
But the French star has a trump card: he’s already one of the most impactful defenders in the league and only promises to be more so as he learns his opponents and the nuances of the NBA. But being dialled in the way he seems to be, and with his physical tools, it’s almost impossible for him not to be a game-altering defender. He’s averaging 2.8 blocks and 1.8 steals per 36 minutes through five games, which seems at the low end of what he can achieve when operating at full capacity. He’s measurably one of the best rim protectors in the game in his second week in the league. Seasoned pros are already doing cost-benefit analysis about whether to adjust their approach around the rim, knowing Wembanyama’s lurking, or just sticking with the plan and accepting that a few messed up possessions will be the cost of doing business.
“I think we still have to play our game the same way as we do any other game,” said Raptors centre Jakob Poeltl. “If we let his presence affect the way we play basketball, I think it’s going to hurt us more, he might block a shot or two more than a different centre would, a different help-side defender would [but]I think for us it’s more about just focusing on what we do and not letting that affect us to the best of our ability.”
In the full scope of things, the outrageous comparisons and wild leaps of speculation aren’t fair, given that just being healthy enough to be an all-time great requires untold amounts of good fortune. But it also seems ridiculous to pretend that almost any future you can project for a player of Wembanyama’s extraordinary abilities is a flight of fancy, or the talk of generational greatness is ‘too soon’.
Consider this: on Thursday night, Wembanyama scored 38 points, grabbed 10 rebounds, blocked two shots and had two assists in 34 minutes of floor time in a down-to-the-wire win over Durant and the Suns.
It was one of the most impressive single-game performances by a teenage rookie in NBA history. Durant’s line was 28 points, six rebounds and one assist. According to basketball-reference.com, Wembanyama’s ‘GameScore’ – a catchall measure of overall impact — was 29.7. A handful of players have posted a higher game score as a teenager in their rookie season and they are exactly who you might expect – LeBron James, Durant, Luka Doncic – along with a name or two you might not, like, did you know that Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, the former No. 2 overall pick in 2012 and out of the league for four years now, put up 25 points, 12 rebounds, four assists and three blocks without a turnover in a 17-point loss to Phoenix?
Regardless, what’s noteworthy is that Wembanyama had his signature game (so far) in the fifth game of his career. None of the other examples came sooner than December, and typically they came later in the season when the acclimatization process was further along.
Wembanyama’s just getting started on his road toward greatness, and he’s already ahead of where he was projected to be.
