SAN ANTONIO — If there was one important takeaway from San Antonio Spurs center Victor Wembanyama’s magnifique performance with the French national basketball team this summer, it is this: Should the Spurs find themselves in contention for a playoff berth late this season nobody will be more emotionally prepared than the reigning NBA Rookie of the Year.
Nothing he faces in his second NBA season will compare with the pressure of being the best player for the host country in an Olympic gold-medal game, Wembanyama told reporters at the Spurs’ media day on Monday.
“It’ll be a long time, I think before I experience something such as this,” Wembanyama said of his role in leading Les Bleus to a silver medal against Team USA. “It’s hard to win games in the Olympics. It’s very easy to lose games. … So, I would say it’s maybe the most intense sports experience I’ll have.”
Wembanyama’s intense summer began with the 20-year-old being named the unanimous winner of the rookie honor after proving that the hype surrounding his entry into the 2023 NBA Draft as the best prospect since LeBron James had been undersold.
He remained in the Alamo City for two months to work on his strength and his game. He now weighs 235 pounds according to the Spurs’ training camp roster, up 26 pounds from his rookie season.
In July, he joined the French National Team to prepare for the Olympic tournament in his native land.
Everything about the summer went dreamily. Wemby had his best game of the tournament in the biggest game of the tournament. He scored 26 points and his French team kept things tight deep into the fourth quarter. Wemby’s putback basket with 3 minutes, 4 seconds remaining cut Team USA’s lead to 82-79.
A perfect ending to Wemby’s summer seemed close enough to taste.
Then Steph Curry happened. Every hoops junkie in the world marveled as the Warriors sharpshooter pulled off the most amazing 132 seconds of his career. Ultimately, Curry’s greatness carried the day in Team USA’s 98-87 victory.
While Team USA players took turns hugging Curry, Wembanyama unabashedly shed tears as he watched the American celebration.
Spurs fans were hardly surprised. They had seen him display emotion during the mini-run the Spurs made in the final weeks of the season when they went 7-4 and knocked off several playoff teams, including the defending champion Denver Nuggets.
“As a team, it builds something to have this level of concentration, all of us working toward the same goal,” Wembanyama said. “It was a lot of emotion, but also some relief after a couple of days after the Olympics, because your body comes down, your mind comes down. But the emotion for me, at least for me, it’s too much to continue.
“I had to scream or cry a little bit. It’s too much to continue.”
Watching from the stands was Gregg Popovich, the Spurs coach, who made a point of staying hands-off during the competition. Observation was plenty enough for the game’s all-time winningest coach. He liked everything he saw of his star player.
“His aggressiveness is the big thing, his physicality,” Popovich said. “In all honesty, he’s understanding what it takes, what he’s going to get and what he has to give back to cover that kind of thing. And FIBA is much more aggressive than the NBA, so it was a wonderful little petri dish for him to be able to have to do that every day and every day and every day. That’s where he rose as it went along.”
A stronger, more physical Wembanyama with a major dose of added confidence should send a menacing message to the rest of the NBA.
“The Alien, some of the stuff he does is crazy,” Spurs guard Devin Vassell said Monday. “Watching him grow and just be almost the voice of that (French) team, carrying that team, us saying, ‘We have LeBron, we got all these great players,’ and he’s looking like he wasn’t backing down from nobody.’
“That’s the mindset, the attitude that we got to have this year no matter who we’re playing, no matter what arena we’re walking into. We don’t care who is in front of us. We’re coming in to get a win.”
When Wembanyama returned to Texas from France, he brought that physicality, aggression and emotion with him. But he also wants to make sure he applied everything he had learned this summer.
“Of course, this is the first thing I asked myself, coming back here, but yeah, there’s a lot I learned from that (Olympic experience). Just because it’s, you know, different types of experiences. So, there’s some stuff I’m going to use, that I learned there that I’m going to use, like, my whole life and my whole career.
“So, the more, the more I grow into my career, the more I realize it’s important to work on the fundamentals. There’s a big emphasis that’s been put on my game this summer, like making an advantage of really simple situations.”
For instance?
“I worked a lot on finishing; finishing things that might be natural to any other player — a guard, for example — but it’s stuff I had to put an emphasis on mentally and physically.”
At this point, it’s probably wise to recall that Tim Duncan, the greatest Spurs player, was nicknamed The Big Fundamental.
And you know what they say about imitation.
(Top photo of Wembanyama: Jonathan Bachman / NBAE via Getty Images)
