Is Victor Wembanyama Too Tall?

In middle age, some sports fans become reactionaries. Due to dwindling neuroplasticity, or some general souring toward the world, they can no longer appreciate how a game evolves. It’s similar to when a music fan stops checking for new artists and plays only albums that they loved in high school. As an aging NBA fan, I’m trying to stay vigilant. I never want to catch myself ranting endlessly at the bar about the inferiority of younger stars. When I watch them on the court, I look for fresh expressions of basketball beauty. And yet, despite my best efforts, I’m having a hard time getting into Victor Wembanyama. Wembanyama, the league’s most promising young player, is only 21 years old and he’s French, but I don’t hold either of these things against him. Nor do I resent him for playing for San Antonio, a rival of my beloved Lakers. In fact, his fiery desire to improve reminds me of a young Kobe Bryant. I enjoyed his off-season jaunt to China, especially the 10 days that he spent at a Shaolin temple , learning kung fu. And at a time when NBA stars tend to be overly friendly with one another, Wembanyama has an entertaining tendency to needle his rivals. As a player, though, he leaves me unmoved. Read: LeBron James and the limits of nepotism Part of it is that he’s not especially relatable. In the parlance of sports fandom, Wembanyama is a freak. He ranks among the most unusual-looking players to ever grace a basketball court. Even in a league populated by giants, he is preposterously lanky at 7 foot 4 inches and 235 pounds. Other players have been given nicknames that suggest the strangeness of their physiques: Giannis Antetokounmpo, the Milwaukee Bucks’ muscled 6-foot-11-inch player from Southern Europe, is known as the “Greek Freak.” Wembanyama, for his part, has been likened to a praying mantis. Before he was drafted, LeBron James called him an alien, and the nickname stuck. Every professional athlete is an extreme outlier in terms of their body type, skill, ability, or all three. NBA teams seek out men of monumental stature; some 300 players in the league have been at least 7 feet tall. But even in this context, Wembanyama stands alone. Most 7-footers have been used as shot blockers; when they scored, it was almost always due to their extreme size. Wembanyama has mastered the skill sets of much smaller players. He can dribble through his legs; once I even saw him dribble through the legs of his defender . He can fluidly pull up and shoot from well behind the three-point line. It’s not a stretch to say that Wembanyama moves better with a basketball than anyone ever has at his height. “In all other instances, a 7-footer dribbling the ball up the court means that something has gone wrong,” the author and Spurs fan Shea Serrano told me. But when Wembanyama dribbles, Serrano finds it “good and right and holy.” Read: Air...

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