Victor Wembanyama is maybe just kind of a corny guy. I think we are all going to have to get accustomed to that. His taste in reading material could scarcely be more embarrassing shy of, like, pickup-artist instruction manuals. He seems to go out of his way to cultivate a public Man of Sophistication image, which is among other things hilariously at odds with what he's reading. He can be tediously smug when things are going well—the "I'm in your head!" thing from Game 4 will endure like a tattoo on his forehead forever—and the rest of the time has developed an ugly penchant for dirty shit that is unbefitting a world-class athlete and, again, makes for an unflattering contrast with the whole Serene Warrior Monk thing. Two weeks ago the 2026 NBA Finals seemed like they might be his coronation, and oh boy, were they ever not that.
The general response to the New York Knicks defeating Wembanyama's San Antonio Spurs and claiming the city's first NBA championship since 1973 has been, by and large, joyful and celebratory, which is great. In its shadow, though, a consensus seems to have formed—online, if not among the relatively tiny and generally more cautious crowd of people who get paid in part to seek journalistic access to pro athletes—that these Finals exposed Wembanyama as something of a sucker and a fraud. He faded badly in second halves throughout a short series that was characterized if not defined by his team, well, fading badly in second halves. The Spurs led for more than 70 percent of the series's total game time, including by double figures in all five games, and won just one of those; they lost all three games they hosted.
More specific to the gangly prodigy in question, New York's brawny frontcourt pushed Wemby around and successfully relegated the sport's tallest and lengthiest player to the game's geographic periphery for its key stretches. While Jalen Brunson—5-foot-10 on his best day, looks like he should be wearing a sweater over an Oxford shirt and teaching elementary school—was taking games in hand with Captain Ahab–grade fanaticism, dragging his team to a championship as much via sheer refusal to lose it as by anything else, Wembanyama found himself reduced to a noodular stationary jump-shooter, a mere cog in his own team's janky and coughing machinery. A few moments before OG Anunoby found in himself the superhuman wherewithal to tip in one of the most extraordinary and heroic game-winning baskets in league history, Wembanyama bricked a pair of free throws that might have made that game-winner impossible. While his own teammate Dylan Harper—younger than him and a rookie—was making huge plays and gutsy shots and keeping the Spurs afloat in Game 5, Wembanyama was setting screens of no particular effectiveness and getting stonewalled before he could even roll as far as the free-throw line. He did not, in short, spend these Finals covering himself in glory.
Still, it's a bit of a bummer to see so many basketball watchers adopt and espouse the idea that the series exposed Wembanyama, and/or that he especially disappointed in it. For one thing, it doesn't stand up all that well to scrutiny: He averaged 26 points, 11 rebounds, and 3.6 blocks a game across the series, fine numbers nearly identical to his per-36-minutes figures across the playoffs and not all that far off the otherworldly per-36 figures he posted over the regular season. His defensive impact was as gargantuan as his wingspan, even as he was visibly fatigued by halftime of most games.
All of which is the lamest and most niggling type of defense for a guy whose team, which is most definitely his and not anybody else's, just made history for the number and scale of its collapses in a Finals series. Putting up gaudy stats isn't nothing, but basketball happens within the flow of time in physical reality, not in a database, and Wembanyama as much as any other San Antonio player or coach plainly failed to meet the championship's defining moments. (To wit: Brunson averaged 26 points a game this season, but in Game 5, he scored 45, including all of the ones that decided which team would get a parade.) It's worth noting anyway, because of the other thing about Wembanyama that ought to temper all of the sucker-and-fraud talk.
He's 22 damn years old! This was his third NBA season, his first playoffs, his first Finals. Last year, the Spurs finished the regular season with the 13th-best record in their own dang conference. LeBron James didn't make an NBA Finals until his fourth pro season (like Wemby, he was 22), and his ass got swept in a completely one-sided series that made him and his Cleveland Cavaliers look like absolute fucking children. Wemby is entirely new at this shit.
How polished were you at 22 years old? How good were you relative to everybody else in your career at that age? How strong was your self-control? How cringe-inducing were the books you read, and how ostentatious were you about making sure everyone knew you were reading them? How properly modulated was your self-confidence when you tasted a little bit of success?
When I was 22, I worked in a bookstore. I had been working in bookstores for nearly four years by then, and yet was not even one of the better or more reliable booksellers in that store, let alone in the entire industry of people who sell books for a living. I wasn't even the best 22-year-old bookseller whose name I knew. I had a weird chin beard and messy long hair I wore tied back in a half-ponytail like Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King, and insomnia and at least two unmedicated mental illnesses. I routinely spent my entire paycheck within 18 hours of receiving it, and not even on anything good or cool. I never face-palmed anybody half my size into a parquet floor or slid my foot under a jump shooter, fine, OK, but I was otherwise and also entirely a bozo. Show me a 22-year-old who is not a bozo, and I will show you a youthful-looking 35-year-old liar.
The point here is not to make the smarmy suggestion that only those who have attained Victor Wembanyama's relative stature by his age are qualified to criticize his Finals performance. By all means, dog anybody at any level of accomplishment who eats shit in a memorable way! Rather, the idea is to calibrate anybody's sense of exactly what he should have been expected to accomplish over the past two weeks—of what, in Victor Wembanyama's case, would qualify as eating shit. Part of getting dogged by millions of people online for, in your third NBA season, only putting up 26, 11, and 3.5 across a five-game NBA Finals your team led for more than 70 percent of the time is being good enough, in your third season, to lead your team to the Finals, let alone good enough that merely putting up 26, 11, and 3.5 across that series can qualify as coming up short.
The embarrassing shit, the reckless physical outlashing and corny preening; the freezing in the highest-leverage moment and looking around for someone else to know what to do; the getting outsmarted and outworked by older professionals with creakier joints but a better appreciation of what's at stake, and a grimmer determination to seize the moment; the plain fact of not being equipped to conquer the world, no matter how springy and insurgent he looked two weeks ago—it was in all of these low moments when Victor Wembanyama was performing like a normal 22-year-old. His particular curse is for what he does during the rest of the time he is at work to become the public's baseline expectation of him.
Most importantly, the Knicks' accomplishment simply does not need, and isn't illuminated by, people straining for a flimsy and converse story of Wembanyama having faceplanted. In his first Finals, he met an absolute wood chipper of a team, one in the midst of what might be the greatest single postseason run in league history; that he largely performed like Victor Wembanyama and got destroyed anyway is a credit to the victors, not a blemish on the losers. These Knicks would have crumpled the Oklahoma City Thunder like a sheet of paper. They would have vaporized the Boston Celtics who won the title in five games two summers ago. No one on Earth was going to deny Jalen Brunson the 2026 NBA championship. Every champion feels at least a little bit like this after winning, but if you watched these Knicks, you know it to be true.
To the extent Wemby has a problem, it's not that he's a sucker or a fraud. It's just basketball stuff. He needs to get stronger; he needs to get his gas up. He needs to be able to insist upon getting down close to the basket, a thing he can't dream of doing right now against more fully grown men like Karl-Anthony Towns and Mitchell Robinson (and Isaiah Hartenstein). He needs calm, efficient, repeatable scoring moves, like the 17-footer Joel Embiid can pop over the top of defenders without a lot of fuss, so that he can get his points without having to grind himself to flour or reach over everybody for a bunch of crazy tip-ins. He needs enough experience and polish to know what he can do, what specific actions he can take, to wrangle control of a game—like Brunson—rather than a bozo 22-year-old prodigy's dumb, blind confidence that he will be able to figure it out. He also needs better taste in books.
He needs, in short, to become 25 years old. I feel pretty sure that he will, even if it takes a couple of years.
