After being purposefully restrained by what the Spurs and Gregg Popovich were asking him to do early in the season, as the organization wanted to get a full appraisal of where their young star would thrive, Victor Wembanyama has been unleashed since the calendar flipped to 2024.
The rookie big man has lived up to the hype of being a generational prospect and is doing things on a nightly basis now that you just won’t see anywhere else in the NBA. He had a triple double with blocks just prior to the All-Star break, and on Friday, Wembanyama posted the NBA’s first 5×5 game since 2019 (after threatening to do it the game prior) and he’s upped his averages to 20.6 points, 10.1 rebounds, and 3.3 blocks per game on the season.
It is truly an experience watching Wembanyama play basketball, as he simply can do things with his combination of length and movement skills that no one else has ever done. His latest outrageous feat came in the first quarter of the Spurs game in Utah on Sunday night, when he nearly stole the ball from John Collins, who recovered it and thought he had a wide open layup at the rim, only for Wembanyama to recover from being at the free throw line to block him.
Wemby with the almost-steal, but gets the block! pic.twitter.com/0C7o4OVGS7
— WembyMuse (@Wemby_Muse) February 26, 2024
It’s upsetting how casual this all looks to Wemby, as he has a foot on the dotted line when Collins goes up from the restricted circle and still reaches his impossibly long arm out and flicks the ball away. Collins can’t believe it, begging for a goaltend because there’s no way in his mind anyone could get to that ball without it being illegal. One of my favorite things going right now is seeing NBA players, who are some of the greatest athletes on the face of the earth, being dumbfounded when Wembanyama breaks the laws of physics as we know them to make a play. Collins is the latest to fall victim to the French wunderkind, but certainly won’t be the last (and probably will be joined by a teammate later on Sunday).