The clocks ran down to zero at the end of Game 7 of the Western Conference finals and Victor Wembanyama embraced seemingly the entire San Antonio Spurs roster, huddled together on the court, with his outstretched arms. He was overcome, perhaps, with relief—that this magical postseason ride will continue, that his destiny remains in his control. Game 7s test physical fortitude, mental clarity, and emotional regulation—and for most of Saturday’s 111-103 win over the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Spurs were the more composed team with the more coherent game plan, despite an unprecedentedly young foundation.
It’s been said plenty that the Spurs are ahead of schedule. But, whose schedule, exactly? It’s a statement that presumes that a timeline has been established by all the great teams throughout history. It presumes that there is—or at least had been—a process to greatness. That there is an arc that must be traced. But there is also ever-increasing evidence that these rules do not apply to Wemby, and, by proxy, the Spurs. Wemby joins Dolph Schayes, Magic Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, and LeBron James as the only players in NBA history to lead a team to the Finals as its undisputed best player in their age-22 seasons. That this is the company Wemby keeps, and that the last person to do it was LeBron two decades ago, speaks volumes. What is a schedule to a player who renders time irrelevant?
Wembanyama has a strong claim as the best basketball player in the world. Yet has that distinction ever been given to someone so clearly in their pupal form? After Game 1, I wrote about Wemby’s lack of a true signature style on offense as a sort of style unto itself: A game that is played through instinct, so as to keep everyone (including Victor himself) guessing. It can lead to moments of unexpected brilliance, like it did less than three minutes into the game; it takes an ungodly amount of coordination to line up a crossover stepback along the wing to force Isaiah Hartenstein to commit on a contest, only to immediately dart toward the paint after setting up a give-and-go with De’Aaron Fox stationed in the corner, leading to a completely enveloping dunk over Chet Holmgren in stride:
There were also notable offensive lulls in Game 7, moments when Wemby seemed seduced, even anesthetized, by his own shotmaking potential, forgoing easier looks for sledgehammers that didn’t fall. Wembanyama will test the boundaries of his skill set, even in the most important game of his NBA career. It’s why he’s one of the most captivating athletes in all of sports. He has as high of a ceiling as a shotmaker as anyone who has ever played. What do you mean the greatest lob threat of all time also has a multilayered pull-up shooting game out to the half-court line? But Wemby also presents a talent profile at the very apex of basketball that hasn’t been seen since arguably Hakeem Olajuwon nearly four decades ago, wherein the best player in the world had a more resounding impact on defense than offense. (Though this is in no way meant as a slight to Olajuwon’s timeless, endlessly influential skills on offense.) Wemby’s offense arrives in the most brilliant flashes you’ve ever seen; his defense is a new set of laws governing space-time. It changes everything.
All sports operate within a framework of constraints—or, limits on time and resources—and affordances, a term coined by the late ecological psychologist James J. Gibson, referring to the spectrum of possible actions of an object within an environment. For instance, a folding chair can be used to sit on, but in a professional wrestling match, the context allows it to also serve as a handheld weapon. All season long, I’ve thought about affordances as it relates to Wemby, who serves as both object and environment. The platitude of making players around you better has largely been reserved for point guards who create easy scoring possessions for teammates. But the Spurs are in their first Finals in more than a decade largely because of Wembanyama’s permeating influence on a more holistic level.
His absurd combination of mobility, standing reach, ambidexterity, spatial awareness, and immediate load-up on jumps grants him the ability to wall off the painted area in unparalleled fashion, effectively enabling the Spurs defense to play six-on-five. His presence alters the constraints that every single one of his teammates operates within. Wembanyama creates a lag in how an offense makes its decisions on the ball, which is all the time that the Spurs’ active hands need to disrupt and deflect. Because Wemby instills a barrier at the rim that is both physical and psychic, Stephon Castle’s affordances within the Spurs defense widen and his constraints narrow. He can unleash his aggression at the point of attack, defending much more physically knowing there is the ultimate backline protector behind him. Wemby flashing to a specific spot on the floor on offense draws at least three sets of defenders’ eyes at all times, allowing Dylan Harper to weaponize that momentary distraction by tapdancing his way into the lane. And the sheer breadth of Wemby’s dimensions forces teams to put multiple bodies on him to prevent him from cleaning up on the glass, leaving a ton of unaccounted space for the rest of the Spurs lineup to crash hard for offensive boards.
Every star creates these kinds of ripple effects on the court, but there is only one star built like Wembanyama. It’s clear that he has a lot to learn in terms of leveraging his abilities as an individual player, but he is already a wonder of ecological psychology. Wemby’s early-season onslaught inspired one of the season’s great tweets, from the blogger Ock Sportello: people talk about victor wembanyama like climate change. Seven months later, there can be no denying the truth. Wemby is one of the greatest environmental shifts in NBA history.
“We never knew we would take it this far,” Julian Champagnie said after the game. “But, you know, we got the best player in the world. Things happen.”
The Spurs have forced a Thunder team seemingly destined for a dynasty into retreat, needing to ask itself some tough questions about how it chooses to steel itself for the future. Is that part of the Wemby Effect, or is that simply how the league’s winds are blowing these days? This season will produce its eighth different champion in eight seasons. Yet, there is an impulse to crown not only a winner, but to usher in an organizing principle for an era. A championship instantly becomes an early glimpse into a long-term reign. It looked that way for the Thunder, just as it looked that way for the Celtics, just as it looked that way for the Nuggets. Rivals build and restructure accordingly. The margins get tighter. The physical and mental toll of reaching the mountaintop year over year has never been greater.
The two teams in the Finals—which will tip off Wednesday, when the Spurs host the New York Knicks—got to where they are by seizing a very special moment in time. That’s all there is to be done. The fear isn’t that the Spurs are unbeatable; the fear is that they’re already here, with all the time in the world. The fear is how easily they can reduce players from the inside out, with a core only barely old enough to drink. I think about Holmgren, who had another dispirited performance in the Western Conference finals. He’d become the husk of an All-NBA player, rendered unplayable under the constraints of Wembanyama’s presence, with a confidence so rattled that his teammates wouldn’t even dare throw him the ball down on the block with the shot clock winding down late in the game. The cameras panned to Chet, on the bench in the final minute of the kind of game you spend your entire childhood hoping to be a factor in, his face blank and crestfallen. The closing lines of “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, echoed in my mind. For Holmgren. Or, perhaps, for the league at large.
For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
