I will start this post off by saying I would have taken Wemby #1 overall were I in the Spurs’ position last month. I loved Scoot Henderson as a prospect but Wemby just has a higher ceiling. I think that, if he stays healthy–which is a big if, as we’ll get into–he will be a multiple time Defensive Player of the Year winner. He has the potential to go down as the greatest defender in NBA history, right up there with Hakeem Olajuwon.
However, I think it’s far from certain that he’s a slam-dunk Pantheon-level great. The hype for him has reached such a level that it’s like if he doesn’t become a top-10 ALL TIME player, then he will be a failure. Not even Zion had this much hype coming in.
No player in NBA history other than LeBron James has had expectations of this magnitude placed on his shoulders before ever playing a single game.
It was incredibly unfair to LeBron, even though he has more than surpassed those expectations. It’s incredibly unfair to Wemby, too.
No 19-year-old should have to deal with this much pressure.
What makes it even worse for Wemby is, in fact, the team he was drafted by. Yes, San Antonio is a great culture, a great front office, a great place to develop, they have a wonderful track record, best possible landing spot etc. etc.
But the Spurs also have a storied history. Wemby is going to be compared to David Robinson and Tim Duncan. He’s going to be expected to deliver the unparalleled greatness the Spurs achieved in the quarter-century-plus that started with David Robinson’s NBA debut in 1990, and ended with Tim Duncan’s retirement in 2016. Five Championships and hundreds upon hundreds of wins later, there is a standard now in San Antonio, and Wemby is the one who is expected to uphold it.
He has some big shoes to fill in San Antonio.
So, will he?
That’s what I’ll set out to answer here.
We have all seen the highlights. Wemby’s combination of length and athleticism is so freakish that he can defend the rim and the corner three at the same. He can get put-back dunks on three-point attempts. He handles the rock like he’s 6’4″, he can shoot the three, and he may already be the best shot-blocker in the NBA, even ahead of Anthony Davis.
Wemby is more than a unicorn–he’s an alien. He is incomprehensible.
Look at this still shot of a dunk he had last year:
Look at where his feet are and look at where his hands are. Insanity.
He may break the league, quite honestly. He’ll just shoot over everybody. How can anyone defend him? And how can you get a shot off when he’s anywhere near? His wingspan is eight feet! He’s like a 2K create-a-player with everything maxed out.
But it’s important to remember that most of us have really only seen the highlights.
When you dig into the numbers–his full body of work–it starts to temper your expectations a bit. Yes, he is only 19 playing in a pro league, so we should cut him some slack. He’s not even close to being fully developed.
However, his numbers don’t really blow you away like you’d expect given the media hype.
This is his full stat line from this past season playing in France’s top basketball league:
Now, he did lead his league–the Betclic Élite–in points, rebounds and blocks this past season. It’s important to remember that scoring in European basketball is, in general, a lot lower than it is in the NBA. They don’t typically have guys averaging 30 a game over there.
In the EuroLeague–again, not the league Wemby played in, but the top league in all Europe–the league leader in points per game this past season was a guy named Sasha Vezenkov, who averaged…. care to take a guess?
Final answer….
17.6 points per game.
(In case you were wondering, Vezenkov was actually drafted to the NBA in 2017. He’s 27 years old, and will turn 28 next month. He was originally drafted by the Nets, then his rights were traded to the Cavs in 2021 as part of the James Harden trade. The Cavs then traded his rights to Sacramento last year, and in fact on July 1, Vezenkov finally signed an NBA contract and should end up playing for the Kings this upcoming season.)
Scoring is a lot lower in European ball. Partly it’s due to the rules, but also it’s a much more team-oriented game over there. In the NBA, it’s all about scoring 30, whereas in Europe they value passing and unselfish play. And this is at all levels, too, not just the EuroLeague. Why do you think Jokic and Luka are such great passers? It’s emphasized much more in Europe.
So it’s of no concern to me that Wemby “only” averaged 21.6 points a game in France. If anything that’s actually very high for European standards.
What does concern me is the fact that he shot 47% from the floor, 27.5% from three, and averaged more turnovers than assists.
And his 3.0 blocks per game were good enough to lead the league, but I was expecting more. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I see him as a generational shot-blocker, potentially.
Furthermore, Wemby’s team, the Mets 92, were able to reach it all the way to the Finals, but they were swept 3-0 by a team called AS Monaco Basket. However, AS Monaco was a far superior team–they also play in the EuroLeague. They’re on a whole different level than Wemby’s Mets 92 team. Mets 92 did still go 23-11, good for the second-best record in the 18-team league.
So Wemby was not unstoppable in Europe. Yes, he was only 19, but for anyone thinking he’s going to come into the NBA and dominate…. that’s not happening. If they were able to figure out how to beat him in France, they’ll certainly be able to figure out how to beat him here.
More to the point, he’s just not refined enough offensively.
Hopefully, that will just come with time and experience. And perhaps the more individual-centric American game is more suited to his play style. But overall, I think people are overrating how good he is offensively.
And I think they are overlooking a bit just how limited he is by his slim frame. He’s just so skinny–his shoulders are narrow, his frame is slight. He already gets pushed around when he plays against grown men.
The fact that he is not very strong and is light for his height (230lbs) is a major issue in the NBA. It will limit his ability to box out and rebound, score in the paint, and even defend the rim to some extent.
And you can’t just say, “Well, he’ll bulk up once he starts working out with NBA trainers.”
He’s got trainers already. And his build is not by accident–it’s by design. His handlers do not want him packing weight on to his frame because they fear it will lead to injury. They’re probably right about that, too. His frame doesn’t look like it’s built to handle a lot of muscle and weight–it could lead to lower leg issues and in general put more strain on his joints.
Plus, packing on weight will come with a cost: his athleticism and nimbleness.
The issue is that he’s probably going to get hurt either way, because his slim build will make him a target for opposing teams, who will no doubt gameplan against him by trying to bully him and abuse him physically. They’ve seen the tape, too. They know he probably won’t be able to handle bully ball. And that increased physicality will lead to injuries.
This is the main concern I have about Wemby: durability.
Guys who are as tall as he is (and taller) tend to have trouble staying healthy. You go all the way back to a guy like Ralph Sampson, who was 7’4″ and athletic, and was basically the 1980s version of Wemby: Sampson’s career was derailed by injuries by his 4th year in the NBA.
In 2014, FiveThirtyEight conducted a study that found that, since 2000, players 7 foot tall and up were at an elevated risk of injury:
We’ve seen guys like Yao Ming, Sampson, Greg Oden, Arvydas Sabonis and plenty of others be injury prone and even have their careers cut short by injuries. Anthony Davis, even Kevin Durant–these guys are hurt frequently. I’m thinking about 7’1″ Chet Holmgren, too–and Chet is a guy who is very close to Wemby not just in terms of build but also skill and play style.
Rik Smits is a guy who actually held up unusually well given his size. He was 7’4″ and had a long 12 year career. Out of a possible 928 games, he played 867–or 93%. The difference with Smits was that he was actually proportional–he didn’t really look like he was 7’4″. He wasn’t freakishly skinny and narrow, he actually had some meat on his bones.
Kristaps Porzingis is another guy who, despite being 7’3″, is actually pretty well built and has some meat on his bones. However, despite playing 65 of 82 games this past season (which is actually pretty good for today’s standards given how freely players miss games), Porzingis has had a pretty spotty history with injuries when you look at his whole career. He blew out his ACL in 2018 and it caused him to miss basically half the 2018 season and all of 2019. Overall, Porzingis has played in 402 of a possible 639 games since coming to the NBA in 2016, or just 63% of them.
I think Wemby will have similar injury issues, maybe worse. His handlers have done a great job of keeping him healthy and not allowing injuries to derail his career before getting to the NBA. It’s a big part of the reason I suspect Wemby chose not to play in the EuroLeague–increased risk of injury playing at the highest level.
But Wemby will not be able to “hide” so to speak in the NBA.
The way I see it, he’s in a tough spot because if he packs muscle and weight onto his frame, he runs the risk of both injury and losing his twitchiness. But if he doesn’t, then he becomes a target for more physical post players and runs the risk of injury that way. He’s going to take a beating in the NBA, and I just don’t think his body will be able to hold up.
So what is the takeaway here? Does this mean Wemby won’t live up to the hype?
Personally, I think it’s unlikely. I think he’ll be good, but I don’t think he’ll be transcendent. I just see too much injury risk with him. And I think we need to tone down on the hype, because it’s grossly unfair to him.
But more than that, even if you take injuries out of the equation and evaluate him purely on basketball, I’m not sure he’s quite as good as he’s cracked up to be.
The allure with Wemby is that he’s a center with guard skills, but my issue is that I don’t think his body can handle being a center–defending bigs like Jokic, Embiid, AD, etc. in the post night in and night out. He’s insanely tall but he’s not going to be playing back-to-the-basket very much. He really can’t bang down low.
Draymond Green and Paul George had a great discussion about Wemby the other day. It was honest, grounded and realistic, unlike a lot of the over-the-top superlative stuff you’re going to find on ESPN:
They both agreed that he is an incredible talent with off-the-charts potential. Draymond said that if all else fails with him, he’s still going to be an elite rim protector at the very least. But they also said that he’s not going to be able to get away with a lot of the stuff that he got away with in France. And they also agreed that at a certain point, his height works against him. Draymond said “I pray that he doesn’t grow any more.” And it was not because getting taller would make Wemby even more unstoppable, but because you run into a lot of issues the taller you get. It’s a great segment and I recommend watching it. It’s about where I land on Wemby overall, more or less.
The other issue is that I don’t think he’s good enough as a shooter to get the defense to worry about him like they would a Kevin Durant. I don’t think his offensive game is good enough to consistently draw the big out to defend him. I mean, a guy that shoots 27.5% from three, you’ll let him take those shots; you’ll pack the paint instead. Even Russell Westbrook in his 1.5 disastrous seasons with the Lakers shot better than 27.5% from three (he was about 29.7%). 27.5% from three is what Giannis shoots (he was 27.5% last year).
I’m sure Wemby will improve somewhat as a shooter and that he won’t always shoot 27.5% from deep, but he’s got to become like a 35-37% three point shooter in order to be the type of player people are expecting him to become. He shot 7/11 from three in that game he played against Scoot Henderson’s G-League Ignite team last October, so it’s possible the potential is there. But I look more at his full body of work over the whole 34-game season with Mets 92 this past year, and it wasn’t great shooting. He is not the sniper that we have been perhaps led to believe he is. We’re shown the highlights of him hitting shots and handling the rock, but the fine print is that he shot 27.5% from three over the whole season.
People are saying that Wemby is like if Porzingis played defense. But why are we assuming that Wemby is as good as Porzingis offensively–or even anywhere near as good?
Porzingis has a great stroke and a refined offensive game.
I just don’t think we should be flippantly assuming Wemby has Porzingis-level offensive repertoire. For one thing, he doesn’t, and another thing, it’s disrespectful to Porzingis, who is actually one of the most efficient scorers in the league. This past season, he averaged 23.2 points a game on 56.5% eFG shooting. There were plenty more players who averaged more points per game, but not many who scored more efficiently.
Plus, while Porzingis is not known for his defense, he was top-10 in the NBA in blocks per game this past season at 1.5, tied for 8th-most in the league. He’s pretty much always in the top-10 in blocks per game since he’s been in the NBA, actually.
I do think Wemby is a superior shot-blocker and shot-contester, but Porzingis is underrated defensively–and offensively. Wemby has a ways to go to get to where Porzingis is offensively.
Overall, though, “Porzingis with better defense” is a pretty good long-term comp–and it would by no means be disappointing if that’s what Wemby becomes. Wemby just measured in at 7′ 3.5″ tall without shoes, while Porzingis, as best I can tell, came in at 7′ 2.75″ without shoes. Wemby is more athletic and bouncy, I would say. But the comp is a fair one. And that’s what we’re looking for here: fairness.
The issue is expectations: Porzingis was unknown and booed by obnoxious Knicks fans when he was drafted. He had no real expectations. Wemby, on the other hand, will be considered a massive disappointment if he ends up being as good as Porzingis.
What we need to avoid here is the idea that Wemby is Kevin Durant offensively with the shot-blocking ability of Hakeem Olajuwon. Does he have the potential to become that? Maybe. He does have the potential. But I wouldn’t expect it, because I don’t think he’s anywhere near as offensively-skilled as Durant was coming into the league.
I’ve still yet to hear a satisfactory answer for why it was better for him to play in the French league than it would’ve been to play in the EuroLeague, which is Europe’s top basketball league, like Luka Doncic did.
I mean, I understand why he did it, but I don’t understand why it’s not more of a concern. Here is the explanation I found:
“[He] needs to rest,” Ndiaye recalls being told by Souryal in Slam. “Go easy on the flights, the travel. Rest. That’s why we decided to leave ASVEL this summer and pick up Levallois, who plays only one game a week. It [gives] Victor time to work on his core [with his physical trainer Guillaume Alquier] and build up his body before going to the NBA.”
This all makes total sense. The EuroLeague schedule is an absolute beast – actually tougher than an NBA schedule in many regards. And one can argue that a tired body could actually lead to injuries – the very thing everyone hopes for him to avoid. And then of course there is also the actual work Wembanyama can do on strengthening his body.
….
it was Metropolitans, a team that was clearly built around Wembanyama with the aim of allowing him to showcase his game.
“I came here specifically for this, to have the opportunity to have a team built around me,’’ Wembanyama said in Slam magazine. “It’s hard to empower young French basketball players in French basketball. I was always playing with players sometimes two or three years older than me growing up. So, I have never been the man. It’s my third year as a pro, it’s time to take my responsibilities.”
Am I the only person who thinks this stuff is a red flag?
They didn’t think his body could handle the EuroLeague schedule.
And then he chose to play for a lesser team where he could be featured rather than organically working his way up on a EuroLeague team?
One last thing I’m going to add, and it may be fair, may be unfair: in. the interviews I’ve seen with him, you can really tell that he knows he’s the shit. There’s not a lot of youthful humility that I can observe with him. He seems like a nice guy, but I detect almost an air of presumptuousness, an arrogance, where he seems to be completely and totally aware of all the hype around him, and has bought into it entirely.
And this ties into his choice to not play in the EuroLeague and instead be the big fish in a small pond with the Mets 92 team.
Luka first played in the EuroLeague when he was 16 years old, the youngest in his club Real Madrid’s history, and stayed there for three years before going to the NBA. He started out barely getting minutes but then slowly worked his way up into a prominent role. These are Luka’s EuroLeague numbers:
As a 16-year-old, he left his home in Slovenia to move to Madrid. He grew up fast over there. By his third year, he was the EuroLeagueMVP and led Real Madrid to the EuroLeague title.
In comparison to Luka, it feels like Wemby was kind of running from the grind, no? I mean let’s call this for what it is here. Luka took the hard path, and I feel like Wemby took the easy path. Straight up.
And that absolutely concerns me. It goes back to the general air of presumptuousness that I’ve noticed surrounding him.
There’s some real red flags here. I obviously think he’s an incredible prospect, but I’m less and less sold on him the more I think about it.
Update: Just to underscore how serious the injury risk is with Wemby, I’m going to share a little table that I scrapped together that shows just how injury prone the tallest players in NBA history have been. I used this Wikipedia page which lists a grand total of 29 players in NBA history who were 7’3″ or taller. Wemby is one of them, so already we are in some rarefied air. I slimmed down the list a little bit, omitting some of the guys who didn’t play much in the NBA (for example, Sim Bhullar, Slavko Vranes, Pavel Podkozin, Priest Lauderdale and several others), and just did a comparison of games played vs. total games they could’ve played to get an idea of how available these guys actually were.
Only 17 of the 29 players made the cut, although technically it’s 28 because Wemby hasn’t played yet.
Only 4 of the 17 managed to play more than 80% of their potential NBA games: Mark Eaton, Rik Smits, Shawn Bradley and Arvydas Sabonis. None of those guys play like Wemby–all were traditional-style big men, although in fairness to Sabonis, when he was in his prime in Europe, he was an absolute unicorn freak and didn’t actually get to play in the NBA until he was 31 years old. Sabonis suffered a ton of injuries in his teens and 20s and by the time he got to the NBA, he was nowhere near the player he was during his heyday. If anything, though, his injury history only underscores my point that really tall guys can’t stay healthy–unless, that is, they play like Eaton, Smits and Bradley (i.e. back to the basket, planted under the rim). Although Smits could actually face up and move remarkably well for a guy his size.
Taller is not always better. The human body has its limits, and you can’t have the best of both worlds–in other words, athleticism and height are for the most part mutually exclusive. And just because Wemby is capable of playing like a guard doesn’t mean his body will be able to sustain it over the long term.
There are only two players on this list who averaged more than 30 minutes a game: Yao Ming and Kristaps Porzingis. Yao was able to play about 66% of his potential games, and Porzingis is around 63% (the table says 61% but that’s because it doesn’t account for the shortened seasons in 2020 and 2021–the figure several paragraphs up is correct, I was just too lazy to incorporate that into the table).
Wemby is going to be expected to play major minutes–definitely 30+ a night if he’s to live up to his draft hype and draft spot. If Wemby is playing 26-28 minutes a night, that would constitute a major disappointment.
I just don’t think his body will be capable of handling a 32, 33, 34+ minute a night workload. The history of players 7’3″ and above does not work in his favor.
If he ends up as Porzingis with better defense, in my opinion that will be a resounding success. But the hype is so out of control that most will consider that a disappointment.
Fade the Public 