We have found the unicorn — and he speaks French.
Victor Wembanyama is a 7-foot-4 NBA player with an 8-foot wingspan who can dunk the basketball without jumping. The San Antonio Spurs center, who is only 22, routinely slaps opponents’ shots into Row P, shoots 3-pointers with aplomb and dunks on everybody, including the battered souls of the Oklahoma City Thunder in the Western Conference finals this past week.
It’s a pity if you missed the Game 1 double-overtime heirloom in this best-of-seven series. It may qualify as the seminal playoff performance by a player 7 feet or taller in history. Forty-one points. Twenty-four rebounds. Three blocked shots. And a no-one-saw-it-coming 3-pointer from a few feet shy of half court to tie the game in the waning seconds of overtime.
The next Wemby sighting will be Game 3 Friday night in San Antonio, where the Spurs hope to take a 2-1 series lead.
“I think [Wembanyama] is the first perfect big man that’s ever been created,” Shaquille O’Neal, the retired Hall of Fame center and “Inside the NBA” analyst, said this week. “I don’t usually enjoy the way the big men play now, but I accept the way he plays. … It’s perfect.”
Reggie Miller, the Hall of Fame shooting guard once known for his own pulsating late-game shots from roughly the arena parking lot, said Wednesday night that Wembanyama’s performance put him “on the global map.”
“If you saw that game, the only thing I could compare it to was the first time Michael Jackson moonwalked across the stage at the MTV Awards. The world knew him after that.”
“Wemby,” they call him, and he is arguably France’s greatest gift to the U.S. since the Statue of Liberty. His sinewy frame stretches from baseline to baseline, those Gumby-esque arms emerging from the rafters to pin an unsuspecting player’s shot against the glass. He is unlike anything the NBA has seen before, redefining the role of the center position every night.
Wembanyama is known as a front-line player in hoop parlance, meaning he often plays in the painted area close to the basket, where other tall and large players have traditionally played in the past. But Wemby often plays the frontline by himself. It’s as if a pterodactyl morphed into human form and decided to swat basketballs out of the air for his own amusement.
He’s hardly a classic pivot; more often he’s a 7-foot-4 (possibly 7-foot-5), 235-pound guard trapped in a point guard’s body, chucking up 3-pointers galore. He apparently declared himself open after leaving the womb.
He is unlike anything the NBA has seen before, redefining the role of the center position every night.
Legendary big men have, in the past, forced basketball to change its rules. Six-foot-10 George Mikan and 7-foot-2 Wilt Chamberlain were so dominant in the post in the 1950s and 1960s, respectively, that the NBA widened the key twice in 14 years, from 6 feet to 12 feet and then to 16 feet. The NCAA outlawed dunking between 1967 and 1976 because no one could stop UCLA’s 7-foot-2 Lew Alcindor — later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — from stuffing the ball nearly every possession.
Then, in the early 1990s, came an athletic behemoth nicknamed “Shaq,” a 7-foot-1, 350-pound force of nature with equal parts brawn and skill. Shaquille O’Neal demoralized opponents, dangerously shattering two backboards his rookie season and eventually wearing the NBA into submission. (Nearly a decade after O’Neal’s NBA debut, the league finally legalized zone defenses to allow teams to double-team him more easily, and it invented “Shaq-proof” breakaway rims to prevent glass blackboards from shattering and steel stanchions from being dislodged from their moorings.)
But Wemby feels almost like nth-power change, the Claude 4.6 of the hardwood. He doesn’t merely dominate the paint; he often squares up from 25 to 30 feet away on the perimeter, swishing shots as if he were a shooting guard from the last millennium. He has made 20 more 3-pointers in his first three seasons (392) than the greatest long-distance shooter in the history of the game, Stephen Curry, did in his first three years. (Though, to be fair, Curry was injured for all but 26 games of his third year.)
Wemby’s deep, deep jumper Monday night would have been called ill-advised by any coach. Yet the piano-wire-thin kid took it and buried it, forcing double overtime. It was the classic “No, no, no, no … YES!” response from the bench, another moment to ponder the possibilities.
He also has this merciless competitive mentality, a kind of athletic assassin instinct previously seen only in the likes of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Larry Bird during their Hall of Fame careers. When Wemby was just 20 years old in his first season in San Antonio, a journalist asked what he was trying to communicate to other players by his dominance. “Traumatizing, sometimes, is the goal,” Wemby said.
He also has this merciless competitive mentality, a kind of athletic assassin instinct previously seen only in the likes of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Larry Bird during their Hall of Fame careers.
“Personally, I refuse to carry the burden of having to hide my emotions,” he said this past year. “The paradox is that you become harder and softer at the same time, a humble badass — it’s a sign of mastery in any craft.”
San Antonio Spurs President Gregg Popovich, Wemby’s first coach and the winningest in NBA history, calls Wemby “the most mature, thoughtful young player I’ve ever coached.”
Victor Nonga Wembanyama-de Fautereau-Vassel was born outside of Paris in Le Chesnay, France. His father, Félix, born in the Republic of Congo, was a track and field athlete who grew to 6-foot-6. His mother, Élodie de Fautereau, is 6-foot-3 and is a French basketball coach and former player herself. Wemby began his pro career in France at just 15 before becoming the No. 1 pick in the 2023 NBA draft less than four years later, turning the Spurs from lottery-bound to championship hopeful overnight.
In modern sports, Kevin Durant was the first to use the term “unicorn” 10 years ago, when the All-Star veteran applied the moniker to then-rookie Kristaps Porzingis, because of the 7-foot-3 Lithuanian’s combination of 3-point shooting, rim protection and ball-handling skills in one lanky frame. Porzingis was special, sure. But Wembanyama has shifted the horizon. At just 22, his ceiling is already unlimited.
“I’m free in the universe,” Wembanyama says. “I do whatever I can and I know what I want to do and nothing is going to stop me from doing it.”
We have indeed found the unicorn — and his English is pretty good, too.
Mike Wise is a sports journalist whose past employers include ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Washington Post and The New York Times. He is writing a biography of Olympic gold medalist Billy Mills.