The Otherworldly French Teenager Who Has the NBA Salivating

One glimpse of the talent that leaves scouts salivating hit the basketball internet recently, in a video that showed the French teenager squaring up on the wing. He executed a smooth left-to-right-hand crossover, shuttled the ball quickly back between his legs, knocked his defender off balance with a shoulder and leaned back on one foot to drop in a 15-foot fadeaway. It was the kind of sequence one might expect from a ball-handling magician like the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic—but Wembanyama happens to stand 2 inches taller than Shaquille O’Neal.

Plays like these have positioned Wembanyama as the expected future of the NBA—not only for the teams hoping to select him at the top of next June’s draft, but also for a sport increasingly defined by international athletes importing singular packages of skill. He’ll make his US debut on Tuesday in Henderson, Nev., when his Metropolitans 92 club play G League Ignite in the first of two exhibitions.

“He’s like LeBron coming out of high school, Magic Johnson after his freshman year at Michigan State, Kevin Durant,” ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla said of Wembanyama. “This kid is generational, and I see him as having the perfect skill set for the modern NBA game.”

The recent trajectory of the NBA—featuring players with ever-more-idiosyncratic abilities packed into ever-more-outlandish frames—has been evolving toward the arrival of this sort of prospect. A list of the past decade of MVPs offers evidence. The Brooklyn Nets’ Kevin Durant has the midrange scoring arsenal of Michael Jordan stretched over his 6 feet and 10 inches; the Milwaukee Bucks’ Antetokounmpo combines the close-range dominance of O’Neal with the open-court flights of Julius Erving. Nikola Jokic, a 6-foot-11 center for the Denver Nuggets, numbers among the best passers at any position and functions, essentially, as his team’s point guard.

Across the positional spectrum, these stars show that the way to win in the contemporary NBA isn’t excelling within parameters but exploding them. In this era of basketball “unicorns,” however, Wembanyama may demand an even more mythical handle.

In addition to the advanced dribbling ability and feathery jump shot, Wembanyama possesses a canny and geometrically boundless around-the-rim game, pivoting and reaching to the basket at avant-garde angles allowed by his reported 8-foot wingspan. The son of a basketball-playing mother and long-jumping father, he will immediately give his future team one of the NBA’s rangiest alley-oop targets.

“I’m thinking, ‘There’s no way he’s about to dunk this,'” said Metropolitans 92 guard DeVante’ Jones, recalling his reaction to a recent drive of Wembanyama’s that seemed, for a moment, stymied by the opposition pinning him to the baseline. Then Jones mimed a long limb extending like a drawbridge over a moat. “And he just dunks it. He’s different.”

On defense, Wembanyama unfurls those arms to lengths that functionally wall off entire sides of the floor, allowing him to snuff shots from the front of the rim and sail out to do the same at the three-point arc. Despite playing less than 20 minutes a night over his last two professional seasons, he has averaged nearly two blocks per game.

That Wembanyama is projected to go first overall in the 2023 draft, regardless of which team wins the pick, speaks to more than just his talent. The NBA’s attitude towards European leagues and the players they produce has undergone a profound shift in a generation’s time, accelerated by the last four MVP awards going to players born outside the US—two apiece to Jokic and Antetokounmpo.

Still more recently, the Slovenia-born and Spain-groomed Doncic adapted to the NBA as quickly as an international prospect ever has. Doncic led Real Madrid to the EuroLeague championship and Slovenia to the EuroBasket title before he was drafted by the Mavericks in 2018. Now, at just 23 years old, he has three first-team All-NBA nods.

At this stage, Wembanyama’s highlights impress more than his stat lines—he averaged 8.3 points and 4.5 rebounds over his last full season for ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne in France’s top domestic league, LNB Pro A. But NBA decision makers know how impressive those numbers were. , for a 17- and 18-year-old playing against midcareer professionals.

“Twenty years ago, he would have been a curiosity,” Fraschilla said of Wembanyama. “Very few talent evaluators could really translate between European basketball in the NBA.”

In one unhappy aspect, Wembanyama isn’t an avatar of basketball’s future but a callback to its past.

Some of the NBA draft’s least lucky picks have been of potentially paradigm-shifting big men who were taken a spot ahead of wing players or guards. In 2007, 7-foot Ohio State center Greg Oden—who would play 105 career games and average 8 points—went first overall before Durant went second. In 1984, most infamously, the Chicago Bulls selected Michael Jordan after the Portland Trail Blazers had nabbed Sam Bowie, who would struggle with leg injuries throughout his career. This past June, the Oklahoma City Thunder took Chet Holmgren—at 7 feet with a 7-foot-5 wingspan, a kind of Wembanyama-lite—second overall. He subsequently ruptured a tendon in his foot defending LeBron James in a summer pro-am game and will miss the 2022-23 season.

Wembanyama’s frame, a strategic and competitive advantage, has already sustained its share of injuries. He’s missed time with a shoulder contusion and a leg muscle injury; in 2020, he suffered a stress fracture in his fibula. There is often an Icarian note to the stories of basketball’s gifted giants, as if their abilities collide with the constraints of human skeletons and musculature. The precedent-minded worrywart will note that those snakebit Blazers, who finished with the fifth-worst record in the league last year, may have a shot at the top pick—and that a heralded guard, Scoot Henderson of the Ignite, is predicted to go second.

Vincent Collet, Metropolitans 92’s head coach, described in a recent interview his team’s careful handling of the player he calls “the best prospect we’ve ever had in French basketball.” “We have a meeting with a doctor to plan his program for the next month,” Collet said. “We focus on strengthening his body and not making him work too much. He isn’t like a normal player, so you must be careful.”

James Jones, a Team USA assistant and the men’s basketball coach at Yale, first laid eyes on Wembanyama in the 2021 FIBA ​​U-19 World Cup final between France and the US and left convinced that the risk was worth it. “He was nasty,” Jones recalled. “He was 17 at the time, and watching him play you say to yourself, ‘That’s the next number one pick in the draft.'”

“What pops out at you is his ability to play like a guard at the size of a center,” Jones said, and then reconsidered his words. “And not just like a center—he’s taller than every center!” He’s a game-changer.”

In that game, Wembanyama appeared in the company of future colleagues like Jaden Ivey—2022’s fifth overall pick—and Holmgren. He swooped in from the three-point arc to smother what looked like open layups; he pivoted into quick-release jumpers and backed down Holmgren for a tidy jump hook. (“He made Chet look small,” Jones marveled.) Wembanyama scored 22 points, grabbed eight rebounds and notched eight blocks before fouling out in the closing minutes of a two-point loss to France. His opponents were left with a sense of relief and awe.

“My lasting image is of him going to the bench with foul trouble,” Jones said. “Because that helped us win.”