In October 2003, I flew to Sacramento, California, to watch LeBron James play his first pro basketball game. Even at 18 his physical presence was incredibly impressive. I wrote at the time (for this paper) that most tall men look etiolated, like the normal amount of human material has been stretched too thin. LeBron by contrast looked like a statue of a normal person – not just taller, but substantially more solid. The scouting report suggested that his jump shot was still shaky, and I noticed him missing short in the pre-game warm-ups. There seemed to be a hitch in his stroke, a kind of hesitation; he leaned back a little on the release. Then the game started and this teenage kid playing with grown men swished his first three mid-range jumpers without any hesitation at all.
Twenty years later I flew to San Antonio, Texas, to watch the most hyped teenage prospect since … LeBron James, even while LeBron himself remains one of the handful of best players in the NBA. (It helps, as Michael Jordan once joked, to start “while [you’re] young”.) Victor Wembanyama is the etiolated kind of tall man. Even the way he runs reminds you of the kind of long-limbed lightfootedness that might not break the surface tension of a body of water. Tall basketball players sometimes fudge their heights – they pretend they’re shorter than they are. I’ve heard him listed everywhere between 7ft 3in and 7ft 5in. He’s 19 years old. He may still be growing.
I watched him warm up an hour before the game on Wednesday night. One of the things that distinguishes him from previous giants is that he’s determined to use the full range of his basketball skills – in other words, he doesn’t want to spend his whole time banging with the bigs. And most of what he worked on in the pre-game was wing skills, rapid crossovers, two-ball dribbling, three-point shots, off the dribble, off give-and-gos … and only occasionally ventured into the low post to practice his left and right-handed baby hooks. He’s got a pure stroke but clearly wore down as the session went on. Streaks of misses began to replace the streaks of makes.
One of the questions you always want to ask about super-tall basketball players is, would they still be good if they were shorter? (This is why they lie about their height.) I’m not sure how meaningful it is. What counts as shorter? Six-foot-six, the average height of an NBA player? But part of what gets people excited about Wembanyama is the sense that, yes, he might be very good if he weren’t extraordinarily tall. For one thing, he moves like a basketball player: stops well, shifts his weight from foot to foot, and transitions quickly from lazy to sudden. Coaches taught him to dribble low, in spite of his height; he has a mean cross-over. But he also has the kind of physical control that lets him spin in the lane, rise up, out-wait the defense in the air, and finish left-handed across his body. There are many NBA players who can make that move, but they’ve never been this tall.
The truth is, nobody knows yet what to make of Wemby’s height. We know the difference between a six-one guard and a six-five guard. The way it changes, for example, who they can defend, but not quite how much it matters whether you’re seven-foot or seven-four.
I wonder what he thinks of his new office. Outside the Frost Bank Center are what look like airport hangars or barns, which house livestock. And hanging high in the rafters of the arena, cattycorner to the Spurs’ five championship banners, is a series of banners honoring the hosts of the “large indoor rodeo of the year”. An NBA game is as much a vaudeville act as a sporting contest. There’s a lightshow before tip-off and play is constantly interrupted by commercial breaks, during which the live audience is entertained, among other things, by a guy in a coyote suit.
Then the game started and this teenager playing with grown men looked … like a teenager. He picked up a rebound and led the fast break by himself, pulling up outside the three-point line … and missing. At times he seemed lost on defense. Part of his enormous potential is that he can chase down outside shooters from inside the key, but it also makes him liable to bite on head fakes. Maybe he got a little tired. On offense, he seemed most comfortable taking jump shots. The comfort of a jump shot is that you don’t need to feel your way into the flow of play; you just rise up and shoot. But he also let himself get pushed out to the three-point line instead of fighting for inside position – instead of banging with the bigs.
In the second half, he grew frustrated and picked up several cheap fouls trying to establish a more physical presence. It looked like the whole opening night might turn into a damp squib. His opponents, the Dallas Mavericks, surged into the lead, while Wemby watched from the sidelines with five fouls. But he was only setting the stage. With a few minutes left, he re-entered the game, and the Spurs deliberately ran a set play for him, which ended with Wemby reaching across an antenna-forest of very tall men and just squeezing an alleyoop into the basket. That got him going. It was followed by a rebound, a gutsy I’ll-shoot-it-because-I-want-to three pointer, a fast-break dunk and then … with his team down two, Wemby called again for the ball in the post, caught it over the 6ft 5in Grant Williams (who had been pushing him around all night), turned and knocked down a 15-footer in his face to tie the game. The teenager was having fun now and 19,000 people had something to cheer about.
It didn’t last. The Mavericks’ Luka Dončić was by some distance the best player on the floor and took over at the end to seal the game. Does it matter? Not really. LeBron lost his first game, too, in Sacramento. But those last five minutes gave the whole evening a sense of occasion, something lived-up-to. It’s a long season.
The league and the sport have changed a lot in 20 years. When LeBron joined the NBA no team of American professionals had ever lost in the Olympics .. until the following summer in Athens, when they fell to the bronze medal, with LeBron coming off the bench. As Wembanyama enters the league, there’s a reasonable argument that the four best players in the world are all non-American, a list that includes the last five winners of the season’s Most Valuable Player award (Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokić and Joel Embiid) and Dončić himself, who is only 24. Wemby could join it some day, and there are reasonable people who think that if he doesn’t something will have gone wrong. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a 19-year-old kid, who just finished his first day of work. He has another game on Friday night.
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Benjamin Markovits’s most recent novel, The Sidekick, about the complicated friendship between an NBA star and one of the reporters who covers him, is out now in paperback
