The hard life of the predestined. San Antonio and Victor Wembanyama’s NBA

When NBA commissioner Adam Silver called the name of Victor Wembanyama formalizing the pick of the San Antonio Spurs, first team to choose in the 2023 Draft – i.e. the mechanism that since 1947 has allowed the basketball league franchises to grab the best young people from college (or other leagues) and which gives priority of choice to teams that have not qualified for the playoffs in the previous season –, no one was surprised, everything had to go like this and it did. And it had to go like this because the Frenchman is not just any basketball player, he is the one who will have to, and most seem to have no doubts about it, to become one of the strongest basketball players, if not the strongest, in the NBA. A predestined. The predestined.

The life of the predestined is not simple. Especially in the NBA. The whole world looks at you and asks you only for perfection, indeed more than perfection, the ability to perfect everyone else. It’s always been like this with the predestined. If Victor Wembanyama is, he’ll make sure to show it.

And it is precisely at the sight, at the first sight that Victor Wembanyama displaces.

Looking at him off the field, so tall and so skinny, with those long, thin legs and arms that look like willow branches, you don’t give him two dollars. Where do you want someone like that to go?, one is led to believe. That we’ve seen all the others, especially the strong ones: big, well-placed, with certain biceps, certain quadriceps and certain calves that look like pine trunks. Then there is the field and the field is something else. It’s nice to see Victor Wembanyama on the pitch. He moves lightly and fast and the speed if you measure in height 2 meters and 19 is not obvious, indeed. And that shot that looks like it’s remote controlled. From his hands the ball always ends up in the basket.

Victor Wembanyama Square. To the point of astounding and generating amazement, which is usually reserved for the strongest.

Meanwhile, there is waiting. A wait that won’t be very long, but quite animated, almost feverish. An expectation that basketball lovers, especially the American one, hadn’t tried for a while.

There hasn’t been so much anticipation for an athlete since 2003. At the time, the predestined was LeBron James. He too had to upset what was there, rewrite the hierarchies of the NBA. He succeeded, he won everywhere he played, even in Cleveland, even if not in the first part of his adventure in Colorado. There had never been anyone to win in Cleveland.

In San Antonio they have already won. However, it hasn’t been going very well for more than five years and when you convince yourself that you are a winner, because you win, five years seem like five decades. Victor Wembanyama has “only” the task of transforming a discreet group into a group capable of returning to victory.

Twice the San Antonio Spurs have had a first pick. They took David Robinson in 1987 and Tim Duncan in 1997. In short and above all simple, the first made them a strong team, the second, thanks also to Robinson, a winner. It wasn’t obvious that the first was a first choice, very strong but he had to do military service in the Navy and there were also other very valid people (Scottie Pippen above all, but also Dennis Hopson, at the time considered a sure protagonist of American basketball) , the second yes: there was nothing better around. A bit like this year. In Texas, and not only in Texas, they are convinced that Victor Wembanyama could become the right man to return to the glories of the Duncan-Ginobili-Parker (also French as Wembanyama), with special guest Kawhi Leonard in 2014.

We expect another epic, certainly something different. A new story, the one in the image and likeness of Victor Wembanyama. The Frenchman’s luck is that Gregg Popovich is still on the bench in San Antonio. Who said: “Let Victor be Victor. A lesson I learned from Manu Ginobili: let him be free to play and see what happens”. With Ginobili it went very well. It was really nice to see Ginobili.