Late in the first half of the San Antonio Spurs’ season-opening 125-92 blowout win over the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday, Victor Wembanyama faced up against P.J. Washington on the right wing. He shot faked. Washington bit. And what Wembanyama did next was, if you didn’t actually see it with your own eyes, truly unbelievable.
A 7-foot-5 human being took one dribble before launching into a cradling, up-and-under, damn-near double-pump reverse dunk … in traffic … on the opposite side of the rim.
“A figment of our basketball imaginations!” was the early submission for call of the year from ESPN’s play-by-play announcer Ryan Ruocco, and honestly, those are the only words that could have come close to sufficing in that moment. It was a perfect call for what might be an honest-to-god perfect basketball player.
Words like “unbelievable” get thrown around in NBA parlance too easily. Usually it’s not an actual unbelievable play that’s being described — at least not for athletes of this caliber. But let me tell you something, that was unbelievable. Frankly, Wembanyama’s entire night was unbelievable. Dude went for 40 points on 15-for-21 shooting, plus 15 rebounds, three blocks and was a game-high plus-31 in just 29 minutes.
Of course, we’ve seen numbers like that before on their own. Combined, however, is another story. Wembanyama is the first player since the 1977-78 NBA/ABA merger to record 40 points and 15 rebounds while shooting 70% from the field with zero turnovers.
But forget the numbers. What we saw on Wednesday night can’t be quantified on a stat sheet. This was, and is, athletic evolution personified, a human skyscraper snatching shots out of the air like a dinosaur picking fruit — casually reaching over, and violently dunking on, some of the largest men on the planet as if they were schoolboys, pushing the ball in transition and whipping no-look passes to the corner, all while sinking step-back four-point plays and one-footed kiss shots off the glass and generally operating with the footwork and ball skills of a 6-foot point guard.
Before Victor Wembanyama, film like this didn’t exist.
I don’t even know where to begin with this, but perhaps I should’ve have started with the fact that he was doing this against Anthony Davis, maybe the best defensive big man in the world not named Wembanyama. Davis had four fouls in the first half trying to keep up with Wembanyama. He was helpless. If you watched the full highlight reel above then you already saw this, but just in case you didn’t, look at this shake down Wemby put on Davis.
Come on, man. You can’t play better defense than that and it didn’t matter one bit. I had Wembanyama ranked No. 5 in this season’s Top 100 players and that already feels laughably low. It has always been a matter of time until Wembanyama becomes the best player in the world, of course, but nobody thought that time would come this soon.
Maybe it hasn’t. Maybe this was one game. But maybe not. In fact, I’d lean toward the latter. The marriage of this level of skill with this kind of size is a forgone basketball conclusion. I have never seen anything like this. Nobody has. I don’t care if you grew up with Wilt Chamberlain or if you think Ralph Sampson would’ve been this had he come up in this era.
However you slice it, this is entirely new. And the dude is only 21 years old. Unbelievable. Literally, unbelievable. Victor Wembanyama, man. The basketball world is yours.