SAN ANTONIO
(AP) — As Victor Wembanyama took the stage for his first news
conference inside his new home arena, he couldn’t help but notice
an accessory that the San Antonio Spurs commissioned for the
occasion.
It was a
replica of the Eiffel Tower — made from Legos. Hundreds of
them.
Wembanyama
loves Legos. He looked down at the 4-foot replica when he saw it
and smiled. And then he sat next to Spurs general manager Brian
Wright and started to talk business.
The scene
was a perfect microcosm of Wembanyama’s world right now. He’s still
a teenager, albeit a very big one, at 19 years old and not averse
to saying that he enjoys building things with Legos. And he’s also
the player, who seems incredibly mature for his age, on a world
stage that the Spurs are betting on to change their fortunes and
help them return to championship contention.
“I feel
like they’ve already started to take great care of me,” Wembanyama
said.
They have
to. The world is watching. And
the hype level is already incredibly high.
The notion
of basketball being a global game and the NBA being a global league
is not new, with roughly one out of every four players in the
league born outside of the United States. But there’s never been an
international player coming into the NBA with the hubbub that
Wembanyama has; he’s already a global brand and global phenomenon
even without playing an NBA game.
Not even
LeBron James had this much global attention when he came into the
league 20 years ago.
The Kid
from Akron, as he still calls himself, is one of the biggest
success stories in the history of sports — grew up with almost
nothing, instantly found fame and fortune as a teenager thanks to
an enormous Nike contract that he signed when he entered the
league, now is a billionaire, the all-time scoring leader in NBA
history and still going strong.
LeBron was
a big, big, big deal in the U.S. in 2003.
Wembanyama
is a big, big, big deal globally right now. That’s the
difference.
Stories
have been written about him in English, French and Spanish over the
weekend. He speaks English just about perfectly, and now that he’s
in San Antonio he wants to learn Spanish as well. If he plays for
France in the Basketball World Cup this summer — something he wants
to do, but time will tell if the Spurs are on board with that plan
— he’ll be playing games in Indonesia and the Philippines.
And if he
plays on that world stage, he will be getting as
much attention as any player in the tournament. Same goes
for when
he plays at Summer League next month. And it’ll be the
case when the NBA season opens; Denver will raise a banner and get
championship rings on opening night, some free agents that’ll start
agreeing to new deals in the next few days will be in new cities,
but every storyline to start the season will have
Wembanyama’s 7-foot-plus
shadow looming somewhere around it as well.
“Because of
all the hype, he’ll have a target on his back,” Spurs coach Gregg
Popovich said. “So more than Os and Xs to begin with, we’ll be most
interested in setting a framework in an environment where he’s
comfortable, where he can be Victor. He’s not LeBron or Tim
(Duncan) or Kobe (Bryant) or anybody else. He’s Victor and that’s
who we want him to be.”
His
presence just adds to the level of international stardom in the
league right now.
The
reigning NBA Finals MVP is Denver’s Nikola Jokic of Serbia, the
reigning league MVP and scoring champion is Philadelphia’s Joel
Embiid of Cameroon, and the top three finishers in that MVP race
this season were all international players — Embiid, Jokic and
Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo of Milwaukee. That trio has combined
for the last five MVP awards; Dallas’ Luka Doncic of Slovenia
should be in the MVP mix for years to come as well.
There’s
even talk of a World vs. the U.S. format to the All-Star Game
before long. That might be a heck of a challenge for the American
side.
“We’re
really seeing the ongoing continued growth of this league,”
Commissioner Adam Silver said earlier this year. “I know David
Stern, who unfortunately is no longer with us, but it was so much
of his vision to turn this into the global game it’s become today.
If he’s looking down on us, I know he’d be incredibly proud of
those numbers.”
Stern would
have loved Wembanyama.
The
teenager — already being mentored by past Spurs great big men like
Duncan and David Robinson, along with French Spurs Tony
Parker and Boris Diaw — is worldly, mature, engaging,
funny and somehow has stayed humble even with all the attention.
His family shuns the spotlight. They want no part of the attention.
Wembanyama’s parents are almost always around, but never
meddling.
“To my
family, it’s got to be weird sometimes,” Wembanyama said. “It’s got
to be strange. There’s a lot of new stuff. But they’re really smart
and grounded people. Whenever I need to find stability, I can go to
them.”
He’s going
to need those bits of normalcy. The challenge that awaits him is as
tall as he is and the world is watching.
