Just how good will Victor Wembanyama be in the NBA?
USA TODAY Sports’ Jeff Zillgitt breaks down the hype surrounding Victor Wembanyama who many are dubbing the best prospect since LeBron James.
Sports Seriously, USA TODAY
No event in sports sits at the nexus of karma, luck and conspiracy quite like the NBA draft lottery. Every year, we watch the relevant few minutes where NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum reads off the results of a totally random ping-pong ball drawing and come away convinced that some greater force was at play with a guiding hand on history.
The San Antonio Spurs won the Victor Wembanyama sweepstakes. Of course they did.
Who else was going to get a generational big man other than the team who got the lottery to fall perfectly in 1987 and 1997 when it just so happened that two other generational big men were available?
Somehow, these things happen all the time in the NBA. How does LeBron James end up in Cleveland, a mere 40 miles from where he grew up? How does Cleveland get the No. 1 pick again the year James is a free agent, clearing the way for him to return and win a championship? How does Chicago, with a mere 1.8 percent chance of getting the No. 1 pick, end up with the chance to draft hometown kid Derrick Rose? How does New Orleans, stung by Anthony Davis’ trade demand in 2019, immediately win the lottery again when Zion Williamson was by far the hottest prospect on the planet?
We’ll never know how the cosmos keeps lining up perfectly for the NBA to tell and sell these too-good-to-be-true stories. But as of Tuesday, we can add another one to the list.
The Spurs? The perfect organization once again getting the perfect player? Ridiculous, and yet, entirely predictable.
Brazen tanking has been a pox on the NBA over the last decade, to the point where the league changed the playoff format and the draft lottery rules to disincentivize it. For the Spurs, it didn’t matter. Knowing there was little chance of rebuilding a contender, they went aggressively all-in on the tank because a 7-foot-2 teenager from France was available.
What can you say? It paid off — again.
Of course, there’s a very, very long way between where the Spurs are now and where David Robinson and Tim Duncan led them, winning titles in 1999, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014.
Besides Wembanyama, the Spurs will start next season with a good 24-year-old wing in Keldon Johnson, an intriguing second-year forward in Jeremy Sochan and … not much else that will help them win games anytime soon. The Spurs didn’t finish 22-60 by accident; to the contrary, it was quite deliberate.
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On the other hand, if Wembenyama is really as good as the hype — ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski relayed that some NBA executives think he could be the best offensive and defensive player in the league by his third season — it shouldn’t be that difficult for the Spurs to get back to the playoffs in a reasonable amount of time.
It would also seem likely that Gregg Popovich, who will turn 75 in the middle of next season, sticks around for awhile when a lot of people wondered whether he’d have interest in going through a rebuild.
In other words, if the two decades after Duncan’s arrival in the league wore you out on watching Popovich and the Spurs win a lot of games, Tuesday night was tough. They’re probably going to be back pretty quickly — because that’s just how things tend to shake out in the NBA. The symmetry is seemingly always perfect.
The real intrigue in the draft, though, came at No. 2 where the Charlotte Hornets jumped over the Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets. All year long, G-League point guard Scoot Henderson has been hyped as the No. 2 pick with a combination of NBA-ready explosiveness and physicality that you rarely see at the position. If not for Wembanyama, Henderson is considered the type of prospect who would be No. 1 in a lot of other draft years.
The Hornets, though, already have three years invested in LaMelo Ball as their point guard. Could Ball and Henderson play together? Do the Hornets trade the pick? Could they possibly try to get some assets or a more veteran star by trading Ball? Maybe it brings Brandon Miller into play for No. 2 if they keep the pick.
Then there’s Portland at No. 3, which like San Antonio had a lot riding on their late-season tankapalooza given Damian Lillard’s age (32), his desire to stay in Portland if all things are equal and yet the reality that they haven’t been close to contending lately. The No. 3 pick — especially if Henderson is available — is a really prime asset if they are going to push all their chips into the middle. Or maybe Portland goes the other way, uses the pick and finally sends Lillard somewhere else.
Either way, those two scenarios set up some real intrigue and potential for mega trades as the NBA gets closer to the June 22 draft.
We won’t know for years if any of these players will change the face of the NBA. But as always when there’s a truly special prospect at the top of the draft, the ironies and the narratives never cease to amaze.
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