It’s easy to see that the NBA is holding an audition on Wednesday night in front of a national audience.
We’re experiencing a fairly rare occasion that ESPN is broadcasting four teams on its platform and none of them feature LeBron James or Stephen Curry, the faces of the league.
Want to sneak a peek at what a post-LeBron/Steph NBA looks like?
In the early game, we’re receiving a potential Finals preview when the surging Cleveland Cavaliers play host to the scintillating Oklahoma City Thunder, both running away with the top seeds in their respective conferences. They’re not just good; they’re young and hungry to take over everything that’s in front of them. They’re making a compelling case for the coveted real estate of tomorrow.
But I’d argue that the audition is already done. It’s a wrap. We can talk ourselves into falling in love with the collective teams of Cleveland and OKC, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, the NBA has never been about the home-brewed bands. It’s all about the magnetic star, the one you can’t stop watching.
The winner of the NBA post-LeBron/Steph audition has already been decided and it’s Victor Wembanyama, the guy who’s facing off against Giannis Antetokounmpo and the Milwaukee Bucks in the late game on ESPN. As much as we’ve invested in the Greek Freak and his remarkable story from the streets of Athens to an NBA championship at age 26, Antetokounmpo is no longer the future of the NBA.
It’s Victor Wembanyama. But he isn’t just the future. He is the guy now.
The Wemby Watch
LeBron James and Stephen Curry were Appointment Viewing. You just had to watch. In some ways, you still do. As LeBron and Steph enter their twilight years, the Appointment Viewing player hasn’t gone away. It’s just taken the form of a 7-foot-5 French phenom.
How do I know this? For one, he passed the Grandma test.
To be the face of the NBA, it’s not enough to sell yourself to the NBA junkie. It’s not about winning over the NBA casual fan either. It’s about the ones who are not fans at all. This is the true test: Can the player visually captivate the person in your circle that doesn’t follow the NBA? Do that, and a star is certified.
This past Christmas, as Big Vic dazzled against the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, my nearly 80-year-old mother-in-law couldn’t take her eyes off of our household TV. Gran, as we call her, was utterly transfixed by this smiling Spur who looked like a video game creation. Is he real? How does he move like that? As her grandkids played with their newly unwrapped American Girl dolls, Gran couldn’t care less at this moment because her attention was spent elsewhere. She was on Wemby Watch.
She doesn’t watch the NBA. In the Knicks-Spurs game, the only player she knew was Chris Paul and that’s only because her daughter and I went to college with him. She wanted to know more about his teammate. Victor Wem … so how do you pronounce it? What college did HE go to? Where’s he from? How much does he weigh? What size shoe does he wear? He’s HOW old? I explained the whole Alien nickname, and she was locked in.
That’s when I knew Wemby passed the test. The grinning Michael Jordan aced the Grandma exam, soaring through the air in ways the audience had never seen before. LeBron James, an 18-year-old phenom who instantly dominated fully-grown men, passed that test with flying colors. Stephen Curry cleared that bar with his game-warping 3-point shot, cosplaying David with a slingshot to take down Goliath.
Wemby has it. In a tight loss against the Knicks, he dominated with 42 points, 18 rebounds, four blocks and four assists, becoming just the third player in NBA history after Chamberlain and Nikola Jokić to score 40-plus points with 15-plus rebounds in a Christmas game. Wilt was 23 when he did it. Jokić was 27. Wembanyama was 20.
But it wasn’t just the Christmas Day game. It’s what came afterward that should sell Wemby’s appeal to even beyond Grandmas. Hours after his Christmas Day debut, Wembanyama’s post on X — “What are the best spots to play chess in NYC??” — felt like a zeitgeist moment, the signal that Wemby’s personality could puncture the monoculture.
Best of all, his message didn’t feel manufactured by corporate suits. There was no hashtag ad. It was a 20-year-old wanting to play chess in the greatest city in America. His tweet went viral and soon, there he was, sitting in the pouring December rain with an impromptu chess match in Washington Square Park.
That’s when I knew that the King truly was in check. Wemby’s visual appeal and approachable personality has him usurping the throne for NBA fans and non-fans alike.
But don’t be confused by the charm of Wemby’s chess moves off the floor. The guy is straight-up mean on the floor. The basketball court is where Wemby’s brilliance truly shines.
The Wemby List
There is no more humbling moment on the basketball court than being rejected. So far, the task of facing Wemby, a man who has 378 blocks to his name, has been a humbling experience for many.
Call it the Wemby List. It’s a non-exclusive club of which LeBron James and Stephen Curry already belong. In two seasons, Wembanyama has blocked those two GOATs each twice. Wemby has swatted his fellow French countryman Rudy Gobert a whopping 10 times. Alperen Şengün another 10 times.
The player he’s humbled most? That superlative belongs to the three-time MVP Nikola Jokić, whom Wemby has blocked an astounding 11 times. (Mind you, no other player has gotten Jokić more than six times over Wemby’s short career.)
It gets better. According to Basketball Reference tracking, 465 different individuals have played against Wembanyama since he made his debut in October of 2023 (or at least appeared as an opponent in a game in which Wembanyama played). Scan the box scores and you’ll find that Wembanyama has registered a block on 182 different players so far in the NBA.
Do the math and you get this astounding fact: Wembanyama has already blocked 40 percent of the players he’s faced in the league. Two out of every five players he steps on the floor with, he’s already humbled. He’s not even halfway through his second season.
He’s spared some players, but it’s clear that it’s only a matter of time before they join the Wemby List. According to the NBA’s optical tracking cameras, Wembanyama has defended 404 different players at any one time in any given possession, even for a fraction of a possession, which means he’s blocked 45 percent of the players that he’s actually “defended.”
Weed out the small sample sizes and it gets wilder. Of the 76 players that Big Vic has defended at least 25 possessions, the Frenchman has blocked 52 of them, 68 percent — or about two-thirds. Of the 24 players that he’s defended at least 50 possessions, Wembanyama has blocked all but two of them, a baffling total of 92 percent. If you’re wondering, the only two players that Wemby has spared so far are Karl-Anthony Towns and Trayce Jackson-Davis. (Hyphens apparently crack Wemby’s operating system.)
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You get the feeling that the only reason some players haven’t been rejected by Wemby is because they often choose not to dare to try. Indeed, when we look at his on/off stats on pbpstats.com, we see that when he’s on the floor, opponents shoot at the rim less often and the average shot distance moves further away from the basket. No one forces a business decision quite like a lurking Victor Wembanyama.
The blocks, all 378 of them, have been humbling. But that’s not all that Wemby does on the floor. The rejections are humbling, but it’s Wemby’s Steph-like 3s that will break you.
The Wemby Way
Wembanyama’s second season has been a revelation even for me, the guy who picked Wembanyama to be MVP. A couple weeks into the season, on the Kevin O’Connor Show, I took issue with Wembanyama’s 3-point-heavy shot selection and challenged Wemby to be, er, more of an a-hole and take it to the cup. Turns out, I was the, um, moron.
I didn’t realize how demoralizing Wemby’s 3s could be. The man can practically dunk without jumping and yet, he’s destroying teams by standing 30 feet away from the basket.
This is the part that is truly appointment viewing. Wembanyama, who is Dikembe Mutombo on the defensive end, aspires to be Kevin Durant on the other. I don’t know what happened ahead of the Spurs’ Nov. 9 game against Utah when Wemby registered six 3s and seven blocks in the same game — the first time he had ever done that — but since then, he’s been just about unstoppable.
Over his last 22 games, Wembanyama has shot 89 of 229 on 3-pointers (38.9 percent), giving him averages of 4.0 makes on 10.4 attempts per game from deep. The Durant comparison doesn’t really make sense in this sense because Durant has never made 89 3-pointers over a 22-game span in his 17-year NBA career. KD’s most in such a stretch, according to Stathead tracking, is much less than 89. It is 68.
So, no, the KD comp is not quite right. In fact, the only Western Conference player who has made more 3s per game than Victor Wembanyama since Nov. 9 is Stephen Curry.
With Wemby, it’s not just the shot-making and shot-blocking. He’s a playmaker, too. Last week, Wembanyama played the 100th game of his career in style, beating Jokić and the Denver Nuggets in their oxygen-depleted building — with a go-ahead dish to Chris Paul, no less.
What a 100-game entrance. There have been 59 players who have scored at least 2,000 points in their first 100 games in the league, per Stathead. Of that elite club, only four of them have recorded more than 75 made 3-pointers and 75 blocks in those first 100 games: Victor Wembanyama, Kevin Durant, Joel Embiid and LeBron James.
Only one of those players can match Wemby’s 386 assists, and his name is LeBron James.
Shooting like Steph, dominating like LeBron.
So, yeah, enjoy the top two teams facing off in a potential Finals preview, but who’s better to take the mantle as the face of the league? It’s Victor Wembanyama. He is one of one.
