It's one thing to open your season with a 40-point, 15-rebound masterwork, but it is quite another to discover in short order that such deeds are in fact "the least you can do." This is the situation in which Victor Wembanyama now finds himself three days into his third season as the NBA's most visually implausible superstar. He has already demonstrated that there isn't any basketball-related thing he can't do, but now he must prove that he can ease the league through the hellscape to come. Nobody else can do it. Not LeBron James, not Stephen Curry, not Shai-Gilgeous Alexander, not Nikola Jokic, and not even John Tesh. Bad times require a bad man. And these are not good times.
You read and heard all about the Bad Times part yesterday. Hall of Famer and Portland Trail Blazers coach (for the moment) Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat wing (again, for the moment) Terry Rozier were arrested on Thursday as part of two parallel and long-running gambling probes being investigated by the FBI. All of it is part of the sports industry's consensual immolation on behalf of a new sports gambling industry that it does not fully understand and absolutely cannot control. That's because legalization opened the door not for more casual betting at your local but the invasive kudzu of prop bets for anyone with a smartphone, including players whose deeds or lack of same are the meat of those bets.
If you are in charge of the NBA, that is a crisis in itself. But it's also just the start. There is also and already the league's ongoing and, we suspect, superficial investigation of Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer and his relationship with a defunct and possibly shady sustainability (pun very much intended) carbon-credit company called Aspiration, all of which looks like an attempt to skirt the league's salary cap rules to benefit their pursuit of Kawhi Leonard.
This is a lot to sort out, but it's still not nearly all of it. The WNBA, which has emerged as a full-on national pastime, looks like it is heading toward an acrimonious work stoppage, one powered both by principle and mutual resentment, but which was recently and significantly exacerbated when the WNBA's commissioner and one of its best players made negotiations deeply and irrevocably personal.
That last crisis wouldn't seem to fall under Wembanyama's already significant remit at first glance, but the likelihood is growing that NBA commissioner Adam Silver will have to guide management-side negotiations given that WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert is currently at war with the union and star player Napheesa Collier. To recap, this leaves Silver to manage the gambling crises and the WNBA labor showdown, on top of Silver's staring contest with Ballmer, the billionaire who helped Silver make his bones when he was navigating the Donald Sterling crash-out. All of this has made Silver's world a phlegm slide with rotating knives at the bottom that he almost certainly cannot solve on his own. Bad times, like we said.
Solutions at this scale will not come easily for Silver, or anyone else for that matter. He has to cope with the largest law enforcement agency in the nation—even though its performance at Thursday's presser explaining the arrests suggests it might also be overmatched, the FBI is still the FBI from an annoyance-generation standpoint—as well as the gambling industry he so fulsomely embraced, and also the richest owner in the NBA, the WNBA players union, and 30 fan bases who wonder what kind of charnel house he is running. No wonder Silver looks more and more like the lead in a Hallmark holiday movie entitled Nosferatu Comes Home For Christmas with every public appearance.
The distraction that will save basketball and basketball fans from all this, then, will have to be Wembanyama. It's him because he is unquestionably the grandest new menu item, but also because his newness is still a work in progress. The bigger-than-life part took care of itself. The man really grew taller and wider over the summer, to the point where he is as improbable as a collection of vital statistics—officially 7-foot-4, and two stone beefier than before—as he is as a player. Wednesday's work in San Antonio's victory over Dallas elevated Wemby from potentially to objectively ridiculous. The NBA has had only a few of those description-defying players in its 80 years—George Mikan, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaquille O'Neal—but Wembanyama is taller, faster, and more threatening from more places on the floor than any of the aforementioned. He is a wonderment who, absurdly, is not yet at the height of his powers, yet he is just on time given the events of the last three months.
That's the good news. The rest is a wedding cake of stacked turmoil that Silver probably does not have the multiplicity of skills to cope with at once. That is not an insult, to be clear; David Stern didn't have this kind of to-do list either, and it's hard to imagine him or anyone else making brisk work of this one. Taking on an unusually corrupt and headline-driven government, an owner with unlimited personal wealth and ambition beyond mere rules, a justifiably ambitious labor movement of accomplished women not in the mood to be patronized, and the extremely rich and brazenly cynical gambling lobby simultaneously all at once is not just a suicide mission, it is a cry for retirement.
Silver knows, as do we all, that American sports fans are not nearly as concerned about the ethics of match-fixing as they are with getting the match, and the prop bets that go along with it. To call the sports fan an all-day sucker is to libel the brightly-colored-processed-sugar-treat industry; those lollies are built to last, but the consumers will eat anything no matter the taste, demand double-headers between the worst teams in the league just for the action, and then complain that everyone they are watching is cheating them. They are used to load management cheapening their tickets and lowering the bar for their entertainment, and yet that isn't enough degradation. Even at that, though, when everyone is working their own angle, no one has any kind of leverage. That is turbopowered anarchy, and Silver's job, beyond managing the billionaires at whose pleasure he serves, is to somehow bring it all to heel. Across two leagues, rogue billionaires, and multiple federal investigations, it is probably a blessing that the man went bald years ago.
The hilarity of the sport that invented tanking suddenly hopping on its high horse at the specter of players benefiting by not giving their all is both delicious and cynical at once. It is, in that sense, a perfect part of our deliriously post-truth American Dystopia. Big Basketball giddily hopped into bed before any other league with gambling interests, seemingly without any concern about the outcome of that particular hook-up, they have made the off-season more interesting than the regular season, and convinced itself that Caitlin Clark could make everyone rich except for the WNBA's players. Now they are finding out that they were either wrong about all three, or right for all the wrong reasons.
So, Victor Wembanyama, the nation turns its lonely eyes to you. His is a divine talent, and he likes the money too, be not misled. But Wemby, and maybe he alone, can make us forget that all the business' sewer lines have backed up simultaneously. Adam Silver's job is to keep any or all of this from becoming a true crisis; Wembanyama's, now, is to do what he did in San Antonio's season opener every night, and to play when it might be more prudent to rest him, and to do things we have never seen before—all the impossible stuff that he's supposed to do as a matter of course. He has to be the magician who saws the assistant in half and then opens the box and releases three unicorns, a top-hatted manatee, and Red Panda on a flaming 40-foot titanium unicycle. He needs to beyond merely unreal, in short, because the reality of things has gotten so heavy.
In other words, Vic, I'd renegotiate that contract right now were I you. A mere $55 million over four years is chump change given the task before you now. After all, the entire industry from top to bottom needs you far more right now than you or it could possibly imagine.
