On Tuesday night, two days after getting ejected for elbow crimes, Victor Wembanyama played in his first true must-win playoff game. Facing that pressure for the first time in his charmed career, how would he respond?
Glance at the box score of Game 5 between his San Antonio Spurs and the Minnesota Timberwolves, and you'll see Wembanyama with 27 points and 17 rebounds. You'll see that he was plus-24, with three blocks and a single foul. Poke around a little further, and you'll see the Wolves shot an alarmingly terrible 47 percent in the paint. You will see that every single Timberwolf was negative, and that Rudy Gobert (four points, one made field goal, minus-15) and Julius Randle (6-for-17 shooting, minus-22) did not produce how the Wolves need them to produce.
San Antonio rolled Minnesota in Game 5, 127-96, and while you can see the faint outline of Wemby's impact circumscribed within the stats, that will only get you so far. I found his Game 5 performance spectacular. To even say he was the best player on the court undersells it. He seemed to be the only player on the court. It felt so different from Game 4's bombastic frenzy. This game felt contained, never in competitive or aesthetic jeopardy. This is the Wemby effect. When I watch the Spurs, I find myself straying from the visual tenets of how to watch the game and focusing solely on Wembanyama. I don't end up missing anything, because everyone on the court is doing the same. Maybe that's the way in to describing what makes him singular.
The simplest way to put it is that the stuff that happens around Wembanyama does not happen around anyone else. His particular gravity demands the game's spatial and temporal parameters warp to him, breaking the patterns of play that characterize every other possession involving every other player in the NBA. Watching him can be a weird experience, which I suppose is the piece of truth at the heart of the extraterrestrial terms in which he is often discussed and marketed. What other metaphor is worth grasping for to express how unprecedented he is? It has to be seen to be believed.
The first thing that leaps off the screen is that no opponent wants to shoot anywhere near Wembanyama if he's in position. The area around the basket, traditionally the object of an offensive possession, becomes instead a void. Opposing players will drive toward the rim and not even look up. When Wembanyama's patrolling the paint, an atmosphere of paranoia pervades, as the offense struggles with the collective pressure of having to score without access to the place where that's easiest. Even Gobert, who is also French and seven feet tall, won't go for it without an advantage.
Opponents don't even like shooting jump shots around Wembanyama, because stuff like this happens all the time.
Wemby will occasionally get got, and he can sometimes be dunked near and occasionally on. He'll win a staggering number of the exchanges whenever people think to try him, though, which they usually only initiate to relieve the stress of avoiding him. After the Wolves won Game 1, Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels made a point of saying that he and his teammates would keep challenging Wembanyama. Whether that's even a good idea or not, the Wolves have backed down from the task in every game since. Fear is not exactly what I read into the Wolves' collective hesitancy in going at Wemby, but rather something more like acceptance. The only thing that occasionally works is grabbing his body and steamrolling it out of the way.
The Spurs spent a lot of time sending double teams at Anthony Edwards in Game 5. This is a decent strategy that many teams try on a sporadic basis, which the Spurs can get away with doing nearly all the time because of Wembanyama's gravity. Oh, this gives Terrence Shannon Jr. a slight runway? His ass is not accelerating down it. A 4-on-3 against Wemby is more like a 4-on-4.
My favorite Wemby plays are the ones where he has to guard two guys at once. On the below possession, Julius Randle drives past his man and a faux-stunt off Edwards toward Wemby. The Frenchman stonewalls him, twirls, and stuffs his compatriot Gobert.
What the clip does not show is that Randle only gets the ball in a must-attack situation in the first place because Ayo Dosunmu had just dribbled into the lane without even glancing at the basket, because Wemby was watching him.
Offensively, Wembanyama is slightly less effective but far stranger. Whereas trying to score on Wemby is a matter of keeping him as far away from the action as possible, guarding him requires getting as close as possible. You cannot let him have any room—not just with the ball, but off of it. Defending against most players is largely a matter of space; controlling Wembanyama is a matter of trajectory. If you let him roll off a screen without hindering him, he will dunk it on you from like 12 feet away without jumping. The Wolves have accepted their grim duty and attempted to pummel Wemby into submission, which worked insofar as he lost his composure and cost his team Game 4.
Wembanyama is liable to go on scoring benders, especially when the Spurs get stops and he can work with cleaner runways. In the first quarter of Game 5, he scored 18 points, finishing off a lob, hitting two threes, getting to the rim on Gobert, doing whatever he wanted. It was effective, weird stuff. He is always shooting these leaning little lob shots released parallel to the rim while he's on the descent.
When the Spurs really need to score, they will have Wemby screen for De'Aaron Fox. Their pick-and-roll partnership is imperfect, as Fox isn't a good enough shooter to really use all the space he's given and Wemby will pop like 10 percent too often, but it's thrilling to watch because they seem to be discovering ways to score every game. There was a play where Fox and Wemby ran a pick-and-roll that left Fox at the rim with his man fronting Wemby. Fox then sprinted backwards, away from the rim, clearing the space for Wemby to post up into. Devin Vassell and Julian Champagnie seem to get their most open three-point attempts during these moments of invention, as if the Wolves are so mesmerized by Wembanyama inventing new ways to dunk they forget to guard the three-point line.
I should be clear that, though the Spurs cruised out to big leads in both halves and won by 31 points, this wasn't a perfect San Antonio game. They had the chance to put the win away on either side of halftime, only to stop scoring for several minutes. They seemed a little dazed by the Wolves' relentless brutality and force on both ends of the court, and they ceded the initiative. It was in this stretch that you could see the team's playoff inexperience and some of the rough edges to Wembanyama's game. He still isn't entirely clear on how to balance his aggression, often spending too many possessions standing around or dribbling himself into trouble on the perimeter.
When Wemby is rolling, he will almost always try something crazy, like a heat-check three in transition, a no-look behind the back pass out to a shooter, or a new trajectory of spin move, as if flaunting his ability to break the limits of the game. These don't always work, though they're some of my favorite moments to watch because you can clearly see Wemby's eagerness to break as much of the game as he can. That's the real fun of his first playoff run: It is thus far one of fairly straightforward dominance, though dominance that accommodates a staggering level of experimentation.
Which is to say, Wemby's nowhere near his peak yet, and he is still good enough to destroy a rugged, experienced team like the Wolves while trying out new material.
