The official box score only credits Victor Wembanyama with four turnovers in San Antonio's 109-120 Thursday night loss to the hosting Dallas Mavericks. I suppose it's not a turnover when a rebound slips right through your fingers, or else I am confident that number would have zeroes after it. Wembanyama is one of the most gifted and extraordinary athletes alive; he can do just about everything; and against the Mavs his hands seemed to belong to someone else entirely. Possibly Pazuzu.
You can't revolutionize the sport every night. Up to 81 times in this regular season, Wembanyama will warp the game in amazing, breathtaking ways; he will do things nobody his size has ever done before, and which shame the agility and coordination of world-class athletes a foot shorter. Thursday night, it was as if he'd accidentally left one of his spatial dimensions—depth, assuredly—in the locker room. The Mavericks would miss a shot, and the rebound would be there and Wembanyama would be there to get it, and the ball would pass through (what should have been) his grip as though he was a green-screen artifact. A Spurs teammate would throw a lob in his direction, and he would leap and stretch out those incredible arms ... and interact with the ball in the manner of a slight breeze, scarcely even altering its trajectory.
That's all slightly overstated, of course: Wembanyama shot an atrocious 5-for-18, but nevertheless mustered 17 points and only got tagged with the four turnovers. (If he were 5-foot-11, 26 years old, despised by everyone who ever played with him, and averaged those numbers across an entire season, the Washington Wizards would give him a max contract.) He materialized enough times to grab nine rebounds. But there genuinely were stretches, particularly in the first half, when his manifest struggle to simply get a grip on the ball tipped into absurdity. It kept happening! His hands touched—or, well, came into visible adjacency with—the ball what seemed like half a dozen times for each time he successfully grasped it. I felt terrible for him, and also that he needed a lesson from the guy in Ghost who taught Patrick Swayze how to touch things.
This was the first game of the season for both teams, and the rust showed. For Dallas, Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving combined to miss 27 shots on 42 attempts; the deathless Chris Paul, perhaps Wembanyama's most important new teammate, scored three points on 1-for-6 shooting. None of this means anything in particular, unless it persists, in which case it means that someone must quest to find Victor Wembanyama's body so that his astral form can return to it.
