Victor Wembanyama Fattened Up At The Shrimp Buffet

The San Antonio Spurs won again Wednesday night, dumping the Golden State Warriors in San Francisco to move a whopping 40 games over .500. The win was their 10th in a row and 15th in 16; they are presently mounting their second 10-game winning streak since the end of January. In each of their last two wins, Victor Wembanyama has posted 40-point double-doubles, making him the first Spur in history to accomplish the feat. That’s pretty remarkable, considering the lineage, but like many benchmarks of this sort, it is also somewhat arbitrary, and can be adjusted for era, if you’re the sort. For the purposes of this blog, it is a pretext for showing you some Wembanyama highlights. Our huge French noodle lad is doing remarkable things out there.

In the first of these consecutive huge performances, Wembanyama exploited a Chicago Bulls roster that could put no one larger or more serious before him than Guerschon Yabusele. Yabusele is broadly fine, as a rotation guy, but at 6-foot-7 he is a terrible matchup for a guy who can dunk without leaping. Whether because he knew his opponents would be too small, or because he knows that they have been eliminated from the playoffs and thus have lost any incentive to compete for wins, or because he is simply bored of doing normal basketball stuff, Wembanyama used the Bulls game to expand his comfort zone, attempting a career-high 27 shots. “Just figuring out some stuff,” Wembanyama said, after taking a surprisingly long pause following a post-game query. “Felt like I needed my offense to get back to a certain level.”

Stretching back through a couple of evolutions, NBA defenses have made a priority of preventing ball-handlers from gaining momentum toward the middle of the floor, where defensive help assignments, rotations, and box-out duties are more complicated than they are with the ball pinned along a sideline. This is all the more urgent when the offensive team has a 7-foot-3 athletic marvel at the center of everything. You can see Wembanyama and the Spurs working out moves and actions for getting him involved in the middle of the floor, stuff that is made easier because of the athletic advantages enjoyed by a skilled, shifty operator who absolutely must be guarded by the opponent’s largest player. Wembanyama has a first-step advantage over Yabusele, but even if that advantage doesn’t give him a straight-line run to the cup, opponents are often demoralized to discover that even a driving lane angled away from the basket can get the Frenchman a dunk, because he can reach the hoop from a genuinely preposterous distance. Now that he is also refining a Kevin Durant-ish pull-up game, teams are pretty well fucked whenever he can square his shoulders up anywhere near the foul line.

The Spurs are doing a little off-ball thing on the baseline, where they have someone screen Wembanyama’s defender so that he can curl around the little knot of shorter guys and catch the ball on the move, already pointed at the basket. The 76ers liked to do a lot of this with both Joel Embiid, when he could run in any direction, and Ben Simmons, before he forgot how to play basketball. It’s especially useful for nimble big guys who can make a move on the go, and as with everything else it is made even deadlier by the fact that Wembanyama can very literally dunk the basketball from positions where many other players—skilled and athletic guys who enjoy normal positional advantages—would have to settle for a jump-hook or a teardrop.

There was a funny moment in Monday’s game where Stephon Castle lost possession of the ball with just five seconds left on the shot clock. Julian Champagnie recovered it by the baseline with less than three seconds left to get off a shot, spotted his mountainous teammate in the middle of the paint, and just sort of awkwardly heaved the ball thataway. Wembanyama was the only non-winged creature on the entire continent—other than maybe a poor giraffe, with its face—capable of reaching the ball at its apex. He batted it at the rim, and then just did a little volleyball drill, up there in the thin air, until one of his taps went home. The point is that Wembanyama is just total hell on a defense whenever he can get to the middle of the lane, even in an otherwise botched action, even in a crisis. When he can get there under control, increasingly it is just very stupid for the defense to bother hoping for positive outcomes.

There is also the frankly hilarious stuff that he is doing now as a defender. There was a moment in the Bulls game where Rob Dillingham cleanly roasted Champagnie with a nifty little between-the-legs dribble, edged by him into the lane, rode him through the paint, and switched the ball to his right hand for a scoop layup. He’d had Wembanyama in his line of sight on the drive, and had every reason—every muscle and neuron honed to basketball use in Dillingham’s life fired very logically and sensibly in this sequence, based on everything that has basically ever happened on a basketball court in recorded history—to believe that he’d cleared the danger. Not so. Wembanyama warped across the lane and rudely punched away what seemed a blink earlier to be an uncontested layup.

You watch a thing like that, or like Wembanyama’s similarly punchline-ish block of what should’ve been a very slick eurostep finish from Matas Buzelis, and inevitably it is still bouncing around in your mind a couple of nights later, when you watch Nate Williams of the Golden State Warriors go up for a tremendously ill-advised lefty layup with Wembanyama fully in his face. It’s such a baldly hopeless adventure, I am almost affronted on Wemby’s behalf: When Wembanyama chucked Williams’s weak shit into the stands, I shouted aloud, What the hell were you thinking?

The Warriors also do not have a healthy true center, and so they too were powerless to keep Wemby from dominating the paint. Draymond Green has made a living getting his darting fingers onto interior passes, but Spurs playmakers can throw the ball into regions of arena space normally only crossed by flying t-shirts and burritos. Wednesday night Wembanyama made alley-oops out of passes that would’ve been flatly incomprehensible in other eras; Green was observably flustered by there being no actual right place to stand to prevent a Spurs pick-and-roll from becoming a dunk or layup.

Steve Kerr called his team “hopelessly overmatched” in this contest, which I think was meant to refer to the absence of Stephen Curry but also sums up their relationship to Wembanyama pretty well. The Spurs ran quick actions to get Wembanyama headed downhill, and the Warriors relied on switching to throw speed bumps and hurdles into his path, to no avail, and to the embarrassment of their wings and guards. Poor Brandin Podziemski: You hate to have particularly floppy hair, or really any other easily distinguishing physical characteristics, if there’s a chance you might get switched onto Wembanyama, because there is a great chance you are about to be turned into a comedic prop in a durable highlight. There’s a theoretical version of the Warriors, stocked with rotation-grade players larger than Green, that might throw a different set of challenges at Wembanyama; on the other hand, I genuinely hate to think of what he might do to Al Horford and Kristaps Porzingis, proud and well-meaning but at least semi-washed veterans with vulnerable skeletons and long-term mobility concerns. Assigning Wemby responsibilities to 39-year-old Horford should qualify as elder abuse.

I am having an easier and easier time imagining the Spurs winning the title. The Oklahoma City Thunder have a better record, but the Spurs have been better since Christmas, and are 4–1 against the defending champs, and those games haven’t been very close. The Lakers are rising, but now you are talking about Deandre Ayton and Jaxson Hayes, two players who would not be on the Lakers at all if Lakers fans were at the controls. The Nuggets appear to have stabilized, but I feel bad about even the thought of subjecting a generally out-of-sorts Nikola Jokic to a series against Wembanyama, to say nothing of those terrible moments when Jokic is spelled by Jonas Valanciunas. I suppose Rudy Gobert and Alperen Sengun are down there somewhere. I have less to say there, as I am both guilty of not taking those teams seriously and of wanting to bring this blog to a close, but I will note now that Gobert has been played out of playoff series in the past by skilled guys almost literally three-quarters the size of Wembanyama.

Quit arguing with me! The time of Victor Wembanyama is upon us. You must accept this!