Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs. Photo: Ronald Cortes/Getty
The reason was Victor Wembanyama, a talent so rare that these franchises were prepared to burn a season just to boost their odds of signing him. This was all spoken about openly. Sports Illustrated published a feature in February 2022: ‘Tank for Victor: The NBA’s Race to the Bottom.’
In the end, the San Antonio Spurs rode their bicycle slowest, contriving to lose 16 games in a row, which took some doing. Now they’re considered a dynasty in waiting.
“Our future was already bright,” said Spurs owner Peter J Holt at the draft in Chicago. “Now it’s going to be through the moon.”
Wembanyama, for the unanointed, stands seven feet five inches, all phenom. Fingertip to fingertip, his wingspan measures 2.43 metres or eight feet. He wears a size 20.5 shoe. When LeBron James described him as “more like an alien than a unicorn,” it stuck.
He flushes three-pointers from way, way beyond the arc; dunks with one foot still on the floor. Like an ice-skating giraffe, ‘Wemby’ glides down court, dribbling with the control of a point guard, but with limbs twice as long. He blocks shots above the white square painted over the basket. In a sport where everything has been done, and every great athlete is just an amplification of some predecessor, Wembanyama is the rarest thing: an original.
At 21, with just one full season in the NBA clocked, the theories Stateside about his potential don’t observe limits. He is going to rewrite basketball’s playbook. He will soon be the biggest star in world sport. To some degree, these things are already in train.
Not long after the Spurs got off to a franchise best 5-0 start to the season, the NBA announced that Wembanyama had become the fastest player in history to hit one billion engagements across the league’s social media and audiovisual platforms.
Since October, content about the Spurs’ number one has generated more traffic than LeBron James and Steph Curry. He is the most followed player on the official NBA app.
Before a calf injury took him off the court, Wembanyama was averaging career highs in points (26.2), rebounds (12.9) and assists (4.0) while leading the league in blocks per game (3.6). Hoops nerds will recognise that these are good, but hardly startling numbers.
And that at 7’5” Wembayama is big, but only just in the top 10 tallest players in NBA history. He is an inch shorter than Yao Ming, the most notable other player on the tall list. He is a short arse next to the 7’7” Gheorghe Muresan and Manute Bol. But that misses the point, which is that in 79 years of the NBA, nobody has ever played basketball like Victor Wembanyama.
In the same way as 1970s centre-halves didn’t score many 25 yard Zidane sidewinder volleys, seven foot plus centres don’t go around sinking three-pointers.
They don’t carry the ball smooth as honey either and they don’t run offences like Napoleon. Those tasks are incompatible with the physiology, skillset — the temperament, even — associated with the position. Centres are big, awkward dudes. They block, they rebound. They get down and dirty.
Shaquille O’Neal, the quintessential NBA centre of the past 20 years, is four inches shorter than Wembanyama. He dominated everything and everyone under the boards. In 1,207 NBA games, Shaq made one three-pointer from 22 attempts.
Before a diagnosis of deep vein thrombosis ended his 2024/’25 season in February, Wembanyama attempted 403 three-pointers and blocked 176 shots. No player in NBA history had ever posted those numbers. Not even close.
In Chicago earlier this month, Wembanyama became the first to record 35 plus points, 10 plus rebounds, five plus assists, five plus blocks and five plus three-pointers in a game. These are mind-bending stats. Basketball psychedelia.
“When he gets going like that from three, there’s not a whole lot you can do,” said Nikola Vucevic, the man guarding Wembanyama that night. “You can contest, but I don’t know. I don’t honestly know how much he sees me.” Vucevic, the invisible man, is six foot nine.
The other thing about Wembayama is that he’s French. Born in Le Chesnay, Wembenyama’s 6’6” father Felix is of Congolese origin. His mother Elodie (6’3”) was herself a basketball player and coach. Despite immaculate American-accented English, Wembanyama only moved to the States in 2023.
His Frenchness is not a big deal in America. It’s not any sort of deal, in fact. It is rarely mentioned. Less than a speck in the galaxies of media content devoted to Wembanyama predates his arrival in San Antonio. This is a trend in America’s rigidly inward-facing sports media. In an article for medium.com, Greg Maurice, a Haitian-born Hollywood studio executive, noted that while many contemporary NBA players are immigrants, “the stories behind how they got there, including their adversities and how they’ve overcome them to get to where they are today are rarely highlighted in the media.”
This year, the NBA has a record 125 foreign-born players, populating more than 35 per cent of the league’s rosters. Going back to 2013, more than half of the number one overall draft picks were born outside the US.
When LeBron James (40) and Steph Curry (37) retire, the faces of the NBA will all be immigrants.
There hasn’t been an American MVP since James Harden in 2018. Greek Giannis Antetokounmpo won it in 2019 and ’20, Serbia’s Nikola Jokic in ’21, ’22 and ’24 . In 2023, it was Cameroonian Joel Embiid. Last year it was Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Oklahoma’s Canadian point guard.
It’s not that they lack layered, made-for-TV back stories. Antetokounmpo, whose parents emigrated to Greece from Nigeria, rose from extreme poverty, selling cheap sunglasses and fake watches to tourists from the age of six. With neither parent in official employment, he was stateless, unable to obtain Greek citizenship until turning 19.
But with Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sweeping through cities, making hundreds of arrests and enacting deportations, immigrant stories are not hugely popular in the States just now.
In Major League Baseball, almost 28 per cent of last season’s players were international, the most notable of whom is Shohei Ohtani. The LA Dodgers’ Japanese two-way superstar made a strong claim to be the greatest ball player of all time during their second World Series win in a row last month.
Ohtani, whose $700m 10-year contract is the biggest such deal in American sport, has been living in the States for 13 years. Though his English is understood to be better than he lets on, Ohtani still conducts his media interviews through an interpreter.
“The fact that you’ve got a foreign player that doesn’t speak English, that needs an interpreter, I think contributes to harming the game,” said ESPN host Stephen A Smith after Ohtani was crowned MVP in 2021.
“I don’t think it helps that the number one face is a dude that needs an interpreter so that you can understand what the hell he’s saying in this country.”
Smith apologised in 2023, but there were many who agreed with him then, and still do. This might be in some small part why the NFL is the biggest sports league in the US and getting bigger. Less than four per cent of this season’s rostered players are non-American. They don’t have to worry about language barriers or inconvenient immigration stories.
In the NFL, all the stars are relatable. As American as they like it.