Victor Wembanyama lived up to all the hype as an NBA rookie. In Year 2, the Spurs star wants more
Here are some of the awards that Victor Wembanyama received over the last 12 months: the NBA rookie of the year trophy, a spot on the All-Rookie team, a first-team All-Defense selection, three rookie of the month awards and most recently an Olympic silver medal.
They’re all nice. They’re also not enough.
Wembanyama wants more, much more, and as the San Antonio Spurs star from France gets set to enter Year 2 of his NBA career — after living up to practically every lofty expectation there was in Year 1 — he’s not shy about saying that he’s thinking bigger.
“It’s the same for all of my trophies, team trophies or even individual,” Wembanyama said. “I love them. I really cherish them. But I want all my trophies that I get right now to be bricks to build something great in the future. You know, one brick by itself is not much. You can get a palace when you accumulate them.”
Let the building process continue, then.
If San Antonio is going to get back into the playoff mix this season, Wembanyama will have to be one of the biggest reasons why. Still officially listed at 7-foot-3 by the Spurs — he looks at least a couple of inches taller, though he says he hasn’t grown — Wembanyama knows all eyes are on him this season, even though there probably isn’t anybody in the NBA that can look him eye to eye. He was the unanimous rookie of the year and the runner-up in the defensive player of the year balloting after averaging 21.4 points, 10.6 rebounds, 3.9 assists, a league-best 3.6 blocks and 1.2 steals per game last season.
He likely will be an All-Star this season. He already is getting talked about as an MVP candidate. He’s the favorite to win defensive player of the year. There’s been only a handful of players who have garnered this much respect going into their sophomore NBA year, and Wembanyama has earned everything that people say about him.
“It’s a matter of time,” Miami coach Erik Spoelstra said. “You know, he’s an incredible talent. He’s very dedicated as well. I think we saw that summer in the Olympics, particularly in France when there were great expectations for that team. And the biggest moments are when he played his best, including our final game. I think that was his best game. But the last two or three games, you could see it trending in that direction when they really needed him to step up. That was impressive.”
The Paris Olympics — where Wembanyama had the basketball gold-medal hopes of an entire host nation on his shoulders — were yet another stage where he did not disappoint. He averaged 15.8 points and 9.7 rebounds, was picked as FIBA’s Rising Star of the tournament and made the All-Star Five (FIBA’s version of an all-tournament team) alongside MVP LeBron James, Stephen Curry, Nikola Jokic and Dennis Schroder.
Wembanyama saved his best for last in Paris, scoring 26 points in the gold-medal game against the U.S., enough to keep France close but not enough to overcome the flurry of 3-pointers that Curry made in the final minutes to seal a fifth consecutive Olympic title for the Americans.
It was yet another reminder that Wembanyama isn’t on his way to stardom. He already is there, and the Olympics might be a springboard to the next level of stardom.
“Victor was great,” said Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who watched Wembanyama in Paris. “He improved steadily throughout the Olympics and ended up being very formidable. But for all the players over all these years that have played in FIBA and gone in the summertime, it’s always a plus.”
Wembanyama finds inspiration from all around the game. He raves about fellow rookie of the year Caitlin Clark, the WNBA star from the Indiana Fever. (“When she was in college … the only college player that I was in awe of. I’m saying men’s and women’s basketball. She’s probably the most impressive,” Wembanyama said.) And he’s eager to learn from a couple of highly decorated veterans that the Spurs brought in this summer, Chris Paul and Harrison Barnes.
“He works extremely hard,” Paul said of Wembanyama. “His ability to shoot, pass, dribble, do everything, his defense … it’s taken some getting used to. We’re a work in progress.”
As point guard, Paul’s job is to make life easy for Wembanyama on the court. That doesn’t mean he will take it easy on Wembanyama off the court. The Spurs had a table tennis tournament during the preseason and Paul beat Wembanyama in the semifinals.
That didn’t sit well with Wembanyama. And what he said after that for-bragging-rights event might shed some light on his true mindset entering his second NBA season. In short, when he faces a challenge a second time, he wants to do better than he did the first time around.
“Today, he’s the best. It’s not going to last,” Wembanyama said after the table tennis showdown. “I don’t have a lot of experience in pingpong, but I’ve improved a lot lately. So, it’s not going to last.”
He doesn’t have a lot of NBA experience either. But he’s improved. The league knows what’s coming. He was almost unguardable last year and he’s going to be better now.
“A successful year would be a year where we don’t lose time doing the mistakes we did last year and we apply our improvements right away,” Wembanyama said. “I think it’s going well because when I watch everybody — and I watched everybody during the summer — everybody was putting in some super hard work. And it just seems like it’s going to pay off.”
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