The Glorious Comedy of Victor Wembanyama

God Shammgod is a hoops legend from Harlem whose devilish, distinctive crossover move bears his name. (Kobe Bryant’s father famously asked Shammgod to teach “the Shammgod” to Kobe.) He is a man of serious reputation. And yet there he was, a few weeks ago, at a Dallas Mavericks practice—Shammgod is now a player-development coach for the Mavs—wearing long pads that resembled a cross between boxing mitts and canoe paddles strapped to his arms. He was running out to the three-point line, like some overexcited fan waving two giant foam fingers, shouting, “Wemby! Wemby!”

Wemby is Victor Wembanyama, a rookie for the San Antonio Spurs. He is seven feet four inches tall, with an eight-foot wingspan. Shammgod is six feet tall. The Mavericks have just one player, Dereck Lively II, who stands above seven feet, and he is merely seven feet one. How, then, to prepare for the team’s opening-night game against the Spurs? Apparently, not with force but with farce. After seeing a viral video of the Mavericks’ use of props, Zach Collins, the Spurs’ center, laughed. “I don’t blame them,” he said. “Shit.”

Height is only half of it. Wembanyama is tall enough to block shots without jumping—but, goodness, he can jump. The night after the Mavericks’ practice, in the Spurs’ final preseason game, a photographer captured Wembanyama blocking a shot by Andrew Wiggins, of the Golden State Warriors. Wiggins, an athletic, six-foot-seven former No. 1 draft pick, is in his follow-through, arms extended, right wrist flexed. His form is perfect. But across from him is Wembanyama, ascending toward heaven, his hand somehow on the ball, several feet above Wiggins’s head.

Wembanyama can “palm” a basketball with just two fingers. He can do splits. The length of his limbs allows him to guard the rim and still hedge toward the three-point line to contest outside shots. His long legs scissor space, and his balletic footwork in the paint lets him defend in the round. On offense, he’s less polished—but his potential is limitless. He has the graceful movements of a small guard in motion and the post-up abilities of a big man. He can pull up for three, or noodle around the rim and gently slip the ball into the net. His teammates seem to have realized, as if by accident, that any haphazard high pass to him in the paint can serve as an alley-oop. He can dribble, feint, cross over, pull up. And, yes, he can dunk on anybody’s head.

The Shammgod clip is only the third- or fourth-funniest thing I’ve seen regarding Wembanyama in the past few weeks. Maybe the fifth. The first came about forty seconds into a game against the Phoenix Suns, when Jusuf Nurkić, the Suns’ seven-foot center, drove toward the basket—and then, sensing the presence of Wembanyama beneath the rim, panicked. Not only did he not get the shot off, he didn’t even try to get it off, instead flailing as he threw the ball in the vague direction of a teammate in the corner. The Spurs easily picked off the pass; credit Wembanyama’s shadow for the turnover. The second-most-comic moment came a few nights later, in a game against the Toronto Raptors, when Otto Porter, Jr., spooked by the spectre of Wembanyama closing out, airballed a three-point shot—and then, after the Raptors recovered the ball, Dennis Schröder had an almost identical oopsie, airballing another three-point shot when he saw Wembanyama coming.

Wembanyama blocked a mid-range pullup from the Mavericks’ star guard Kyrie Irving less than a minute into his first game in the N.B.A. (So much for that practice against Shammgod’s pool noodles.) But the Mavericks later found perhaps the best approach for dealing with the nineteen-year-old phenom: they got him in foul trouble, which kept him off the court for much of the game. Still, he returned toward the end, and scored nine of his fifteen points in the game’s final seven minutes. In his second N.B.A. game, he had twenty-one points and twelve rebounds for his first double-double. By his fifth game—a win over the Phoenix Suns, in which he scored thirty-eight points, including ten during a pivotal 12–0 fourth-quarter run—he looked like he’d soon be the best player in the N.B.A. I was in Denver the next day, where the actual best player in the world, Nikola Jokić—a six-foot-eleven savant of positionless basketball—was casually crushing opposition. Even there, much of the talk was of Wembanyama.

He has had more than his share of turnovers and reckless shots. In his seventh N.B.A. game, a blowout loss to the Knicks, he shot four for fourteen, and the crowd at Madison Square Garden chanted “Overrated!” In a loss to the Heat on Sunday night, he shot two of nine from behind the three-point arc, and had seven turnovers (along with a few breathtaking passes). And it’s true that the Spurs have lost the majority of their games, many of them by lopsided scores. Still, it seems to me that the joke’s on us. Because part of the pleasure of watching Wembanyama play, and a measure of his tremendous promise, isn’t just how ridiculous he makes other players look. It’s how silly he’s willing to look, too.

Wembanyama grew up in Le Chesnay, a small town outside Paris. His father competed in track and field, and taught him perfect running form; his mother played basketball for the French national team. Later, she became a coach, and he tagged along. “She’s more like me,” Wembanyama told Slam magazine last year. “We really look alike, and she’s kind of eccentric sometimes.” When he was thirteen, and already about six feet six inches, he joined France’s under-fifteen national team. His former coach told Slam about the moment when Wemby pulled up for three on his very first play. “For a player his size, so tall, playing like a 2, I was like, Is he crazy? What the hell is he doing? And then the ball went in. A big swish. Everybody in the gym was smiling, you can tell people were thinking, Who is that guy? That monster? But in a good way. It was legendary. At that time, Victor was far from dominating—he was prone to mistakes, turnovers, bad plays, and yet one play was enough to make him a legend.”

It’s clear that Wembanyama is insanely competitive; he wants to win, not show off. When the Spurs came back to beat the Suns, he celebrated like they’d won the championship. But he plays with a sense of play—as though he recognizes that it’s a game, after all. In the summer of 2021, his agent arranged for him to spend some time with Holger Geschwindner, a coach whose unorthodox approach to training was embraced by the German star Dirk Nowitzki. Geschwindner calls it “The Institute of Applied Nonsense.” Wembanyama called it “really weird.” But he saw something in it: a mental dedication, an attention to balance. In one recent game, against the Indiana Pacers, Wembanyama twirled through traffic toward the basket and tossed up an absurd, impossible shot, which did not go in. It made me laugh out loud. But his balance, aerial awareness, and footwork were magnificent.

There is some debate among N.B.A. fans about how good the Spurs are supposed to be right now, how quickly the team should try to build around Wembanyama, to maximize his potential and contend for a title. The Spurs are trying what Gregg Popovich, the team’s longtime head coach, calls an “experiment,” with the twenty-year-old forward Jeremy Sochan, who has no experience running an offense—and, apparently, little natural feel for doing so—playing point guard. This doesn’t make things easy for Wembanyama. Precisely the opposite.

But there are different ways of helping a young player to develop, and setting him up to succeed. You can surround him with great players who know how to draw defenses away and get him the ball in good positions. Something like that is happening in Oklahoma City, where Chet Holmgren, another young and skinny seven-footer who can dribble and shoot, is thriving on a team that could challenge the best squads in the Western Conference. The Spurs are doing something else, giving Wembanyama the license to try and the freedom to fail. “Every game is a game of mistakes,” Popovich said after the loss to the Knicks. “You learn when you win. You learn when you lose.” One of the things that Wembanyama, and the Spurs, will have to learn is when to get serious. In the meantime, we might as well laugh and enjoy the show. ♦