Victor Wembanyama Is Here. The NBA’s Scorers Should Be Afraid.
The San Antonio Spurs’ super-rookie debuts Wednesday night against the Dallas Mavericks, and he’ll be at his most captivating when he doesn’t have the ball
When Victor Wembanyama steps onto a basketball court, its geometry changes. Vincent Collet, Wembanyama’s coach with Metropolitans 92 during his final season in France, has witnessed the phenomenon. An opposing team can choreograph the perfect sequence of screens and passes, springing a shooter into open air with the rim in his sights. Then Wembanyama—7-foot-4, with the arms of an even taller man and the quick stride of a smaller one—enters the frame.
“You think you are alone,” Collet said in a recent interview. “And then, he’s back.”
Wednesday night in San Antonio, when his Spurs play the Dallas Mavericks, the most anticipated rookie since LeBron James will log his first regular-season minutes in the NBA. Fans around the world will tune in to glimpse dazzling feats of scoring. Will he debut his signature running, one-footed 3-pointer? If he misses it, will he stretch out and slam home his own put-back dunk?
But the 19-year-old Wembanyama’s premier talent—and the one likeliest to transform the league he’s about to join—isn’t making shots. It’s stopping them.
The NBA welcomes Wembanyama amid a period of peak offense, with increasingly precise shooters spreading to more and more distant sectors of the floor. According to Stats Perform, the four most efficient scoring campaigns in league history, on a per-possession basis, have come in the last four seasons, with a record of 114.1 points per 100 possessions set in 2022-23.
This isn’t, in league circles, an entirely happy development. Defensive-minded coaches fret over a version of the sport lacking balance, in which scorers have simply evolved past the capabilities of those tasked with checking them. If “space” is the watchword of the Stephen Curry era, players large and nimble enough to clog it are more needed than they’ve ever been.
“The movement demands required in today’s basketball are so different than what they were 20 years ago,” said Ben Taylor, a cognitive scientist who has spent a career studying the evolution of the game’s strategies. Back then, drivers bore down on the rim, and centers camped in the lane to barricade it. In the 2020s, big men have to sprint past the 3-point arc to dissuade snipers and back to the basket to break up alley-oop lobs, often making multiple round trips during a single loop of the shot clock.
The athlete capable of carrying out the updated job description is rare. Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert, 7-foot-1, has averaged more than two blocks per game over a 10-year career, but speedy guards can get around him. The Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green may be the most respected defender of his generation, a blur of anticipatory action, but he’s only 6-foot-6.
“It’s the combination of that physical attribute, the length, plus having mobility and awareness,” Taylor said. “What you want are possessions where you’re just like, ‘This guy’s everywhere! How is he doing this?’”
With Metropolitans 92, Collet encouraged his pupil to dictate instead of react. Wembanyama learned to bait traps for players charging at him, feinting one direction only to step in another. Teams commonly “funnel” a scorer to a second defender lying in wait; Wembanyama was so wide and well-schooled that he could funnel opponents to himself. His last season in France’s LNB Pro A, he blocked three shots per game, nearly double the average of the second-place finisher.
“He has fun denying whatever the ballhandler wants to do,” Collet said. “He likes the control.”
Wembanyama’s highlight reel from the Spurs’ preseason suggests the scope of that control. He unfurls a banner of an arm—his wingspan is a reported 8 feet—to flick away a 3-pointer. He reaches from a blind spot to swipe a steal and race the other way for a jam. In a three-second sequence spanning half the playing surface, he chases a shooter from the arc, tails him to the backboard and, with a palm almost as wide as a basketball, smothers a lay-up attempt. Over four preseason contests, Wembanyama averaged 4.7 blocks per 36 minutes—a rate that would have led the NBA last year.
“There’s nobody else in the league who can do some of the stuff that he can do,” said Spurs guard Devin Vassell. He wondered how Gregg Popovich, San Antonio’s Hall-of-Fame head coach, might deploy Wembanyama—as a roving presence, a back-line firewall, or both. “I don’t think he realizes how much he’s going to be able to help us out.”
The early stages of a basketball career consist of hype cycles and reality checks, and Wembanyama will inevitably struggle to match standards of pace and force. He’s skinny enough to present a ripe target to dunkers.
“They’ll welcome him to the league the right way,” Collet said with a laugh.
There is a more serious threat than embarrassment. Joining Wembanyama in this year’s rookie class is fellow beanpole Chet Holmgren, a 7-foot-1 former Gonzaga Bulldog who was selected second in the 2022 NBA draft. His first season was postponed by a Lisfranc injury to his foot, sustained after James—4 inches shorter than Holmgren but 55 pounds heavier—collided with him in a pro-am game. Wembanyama, who weighs 210 pounds, has adopted a regimen of strength training and stretching designed to keep his distinctive body intact; it remains to be seen whether such methods will hold up to the damage inflicted by Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Talk of Wembanyama’s fragility echoes the concerns that followed Curry during his early professional years. Observers worried that the guard was too slight to stand up to the rigors of an 82-game season, that he would get shoved out of anything more than a specialist’s role. In time, of course, Curry reoriented the sport, proving that a new-school mastery of angle and distance could outdo old-school muscle.
Wembanyama brings the potential for a similar shift—a catching-up to Curry’s offensive revolution, on its own terms. There is precedent for basketball’s defensive future in its history. Taylor cited Bill Russell’s book “Russell Rules,” in which the 11-time Celtics champion wrote of flummoxing rivals like Wilt Chamberlain using the “horizontal game.”
“I could run the floor, move laterally, block shots, put the ball on the floor, play defense as strongly away from the basket as I did near it,” Russell wrote. His mobility let him “determine where the ball was and where it was going.”
The difference, in Wembanyama’s case, is the shape of the body animating the ethos. Hustle and foresight alone cannot, as Wembanyama’s legs can, collapse the space between the sideline and the rim.
“He takes two steps and covers 25 feet, and you’re like, ‘Wait a second,’” Taylor said. “‘That actually doesn’t make human sense.’”