Copyright The Ringer
One must imagine Victor Wembanyama annoyed. Two straight games with the same opening gambit, but still, Wemby can’t quite read the chessboard as quickly as he’d like to. The summer after Wembanyama’s rookie season, the San Antonio Spurs phenom took to a rather unconventional form of high-intensity training, oscillating between intense sprints on an exercise bike and minute-long rounds of chess with a team employee. Back and forth, one immediately after the other, for an entire workout. It was a unique way of increasing the capacity to absorb information under duress. “If you can transition from, say, playing chess to training your body at a high level on a cardio burst, that makes basketball so much easier, and it makes the game so much slower to you,” his trainer Melvin Sanders told Men’s Health. There aren’t many 21-year-olds in league history who have taken as holistic an approach to training both body and mind. But even after a summertime spiritual fact-finding mission spanning the globe, nothing teaches you more about your place in the game than the game itself. After Wemby led San Antonio to its best start in franchise history amid a string of performances that launched him into best in the world conversations ahead of schedule, the Spurs have lost two straight games in somewhat humbling fashion, and Wembanyama, after an early string of dominance, has reached a legitimate roadblock. The Spurs have become the ultimate target, and the pressure has funneled directly to Wemby. “Right now, it feels like the game is going fast, somehow,” Wembanyama admitted to reporters after a loss to the Los Angeles Lakers on Wednesday night. “As we get better as a team, and as we got better individually, it feels like the opponents have stepped up in some ways defensively.” Under normal circumstances, the NBA’s defending champions are the ones who set the specific agenda and terms of engagement for a season. But somehow, the Thunder’s dynastic ambitions don’t feel like the league’s most foreboding reality. Listen to players and coaches talk about the challenge of defending Wembanyama, and the tenor bounces from awe to a sort of competitive glee. Grayson Allen talked about the Phoenix Suns’ defensive game plan the way a building planner might run through their AutoCAD draft with a client. You’ve never seen Deandre Ayton so excited to talk about the Lakers’ low-man help rotations—and you may never see it again! Teams are gearing up for their matchups against San Antonio with a gravity and focus reserved for the very best, yet the youthful Spurs haven’t sniffed the postseason in more than half a decade. This is the truest measure of impact, the surest sign of begrudging respect. The rest of the league is treating Wembanyama’s emergence as an existential threat, and this opening month has quickly turned into a sort of marketplace of ideas for the NBA’s equivalent to the UN Security Council, establishing a blueprint and relevant protocol for how to address a rising star who could very well define the next 20 years of the sport, never mind the next five. Shit, this story might be part of the problem here: Wemby’s ungodly numbers in his first five games this season—30.2 points, 14.6 rebounds, and 4.8 blocks per game—have winnowed in the past two: 14 points on 14 field goal attempts per game and five assists to 11 turnovers. The winning strategy against the Spurs thus far has been sending as many bodies at Wemby as possible, as fast as possible. This past Sunday, Phoenix went with a Bert-and-Ernie strategy to deny Wemby his spots: Royce O’Neale used his low center of gravity to fill the negative space that Wembanyama is able to create with his long strides; Ryan Dunn used his length, explosiveness, and instantaneous leaping ability to challenge him vertically as a helper. And for cleanup, the Suns deployed Mark Williams, one of the only players with a higher standing reach than Wemby himself. The game plan isn’t exactly novel—it’s a fairly textbook strategy for how you slow down a player with an overwhelming height advantage, across any level of basketball. But it does require a concerted effort, which Wembanyama’s mere presence appears to galvanize. “The quickness at which the double comes is so much faster than in the past,” he said. “It feels like teams are very prepared from previous schemes defensively coming into games against us.” These are the inevitable growing pains en route to superstardom. Kevin Durant got his education in getting crowded and outmuscled from the artist formerly known as Ron Artest in 2010; for years, the best way to mitigate Joel Embiid’s impact was to send the double and force him to beat you by making the right pass at the right time. The book on Wemby is a compilation of the two, full of sound principles that can be executed by any team—the Spurs’ two losses have come at the hands of the Suns and Lakers, two below-average defensive teams so far this year. All the aggressive off-ball denials and crowding have muddied San Antonio’s best-laid plans on offense and forced Wemby to second-guess his actions and his teammates to second-guess their ability to feed him the ball. By the fourth quarter of Wednesday’s game against the Lakers, handing it off to Wembanyama at the elbow was the only “safe” way to bring him into the play. But it also meant forcing him to create from a standstill, encouraging him to drive into a sea of ready and willing help defenders. Wemby has made a conscious effort to be a more forceful driver this year, dramatically inverting his shot diet from last season. It’s largely been terrifying—there are new stages of torment unlocked when a physical anomaly decides to embrace his physicality. But the Spurs’ timing has been thrown off as defenses have become more attuned to Wemby’s predilections, and it’s led to numerous dead ends. After committing zero offensive fouls during the Spurs’ first four games, Wembanyama has been called for six in the past three—half of which came in Wednesday’s game alone. The Spurs obviously need to find new ways to get Wemby the ball on the attack, and Wemby needs to more expediently diagnose the doubles that are being thrown his way. Luckily, the answer to both problems might be arriving soon. There’s been plenty of consternation about San Antonio’s backcourt and where De’Aaron Fox will fit into it, especially after the team’s hot start with both reigning Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle and 2025 no. 2 pick Dylan Harper showing promise. But this lull has reemphasized how vital Fox is to the development of both Wembanyama as a player and the Spurs as a unit. Harper—who is now expected to miss multiple weeks with a calf strain—is a staccato-stepping savant on drives, but at this stage he might be best leaned on as a sixth man. Castle has continued to build out the frame of possible stardom, but he leads the league in just about every turnover statistic, overburdened in a role that wasn’t made for him. What the Spurs need more than anything is a player who can dissolve the ability to double Wemby with impunity and someone who can reset the team’s internal rhythm. That was the idea when the Spurs acquired Fox last season, and it remains the prevailing notion now. There is no one on San Antonio’s roster (and there are few players in the league) who can match Fox’s speed-skater athleticism, and we’ll soon see what kind of compounding effect the team’s two best players have on each other over the course of a full season. Fox is the only guard on the team who can reliably get past the first line of defense without a ball screen, which will open up entire worlds of possibility when teams have to choose between aggressively denying Wemby and letting arguably the fastest player in the NBA run amok. There has been a tentativeness during this feeling-out process over the past few games. Possessions have been dragged through mud as the team has been slow to adjust to how opponents are denying Wemby the ball. The calculus changes when there’s another All-Star on the floor. Fox can initiate offense earlier in the shot clock with Wembanyama operating as a trailer; he also has plenty of reps operating off a big man creating from the elbow. The current blueprint for how to stop Wemby should soon be moot, if only because Wemby should no longer be the sole focal point. And so the adaptation game begins anew. Maybe it’s simply the visceral response to seeing an athlete of Wemby’s dimensions play out on a three-dimensional plane, but it’s hard not to filter his performances through a kaleidoscope of cognitive biases. I guess it’s what happens every year under the influence of a small sample, but the proclamations are bigger, bolder, and more consequential with Wemby, given his potential to change what we know about the sport. There are times when I legitimately don’t know how to process the things he does on the court because the style with which he plays is unprecedented. I’ve described style in the past as “an ever-evolving understanding of one’s dimensions and how they behave in space.” Wembanyama is arguably the ultimate case study. Wemby’s only block on Wednesday happened as he was stumbling away from Ayton underneath the rim—it was a variation on what has become one of the early-season hallmarks of his game: swatting a shot in such a compromised position that the act would be impossible for any other player in the world. His economy of motion invokes some strange stylistic forebears. Like what if the late, great Dikembe Mutombo blocked shots while pirouetting à la Pascal Siakam? Just a few years ago, that visual would have made no sense. I mean, it still doesn’t. But then you watch Wemby twist, writhe, and contort toward the ball on defense like it’s the most natural movement in the world. You feel a little jolt in the system. And this is the kind of hallucinogenic property emanating from one of Wemby’s bad games, when he had trouble scoring on Dalton Knecht. So it turns out that five games aren’t enough to anoint a 21-year-old as the best basketball player on the planet—but that appeal to novelty was an instinctive response for so many basketball fans around the world. It suggests that we want to be awed. It suggests that we’re open to championing a brave new world without the living legends who are still gracing the court. And the equal and opposite response amid his struggles suggests that both the league and its fans aren’t ready to hand over the fate of basketball just yet. This is the central tension of Wemby and the narrative arc of the NBA for the foreseeable future. Wemby is not a system unto himself, but a paradigm. Teams will spend the next decade-plus trying to suss out a player who himself isn’t particularly close to understanding his final form. Whatever it is, it’s probably galaxies away from the player we’ve seen stymied over the past few games. “There’s no worry, really. It’s just trying to figure out what’s best,” Wembanyama said Wednesday night. “We’re going to catch up on it, of course, but it’s on us to see how quick.”
