Victor Wembanyama hails from a place stranger that outer space: suburban Paris.
Yet, more than French, he is an Alien. The Alien.
He threatens to undermine the fabric of reality for us mere life forms, to upend all the norms we ascribe to basketball.
In one domain, he already has: Blocks.
Wemby is Le New Jeune on the Block. In two short years, he has established himself as the premier shot denier in the NBA.
Lo the past decade, he lays claim to 2 of the Top 3 seasons of individual blocks-itry.
Yosemite Hassan is the interregnum and appears twice in Top 10, which is our necessary daily reminder that, whatever his shortcomings, Hassan was a more than serviceable NBA big whose prime could have been better utilized outside of the context of a rudderless, anachronistic Miami Heat squad in the post-Lebron years.
Subsequently a cocktail of Myles Turner, Triple J, and – what have we here!? – a splash of Grey Goose in the form fellow Citoyen Rudy Gobert.
Wemby has claimed the past 2 block titles, the first to accomplish such a feat since a young AD wrested the mantle from Ibaka in the early 2000s. (Heretics will assert that technically the Blocks Title is awarded to the most prolific blocker on a per game basis, provided a minimum number of games cutoff is met. Burden yourself not with these confusing codicils, and just go by total amount, as I do here.)
Walker Texas Kessler has ranked in the Top 12 for all of his eligible seasons.
Presumably it’s an NBA Finals hangover that kept Splash Mountain from being the only player to finish in the Top 7 in blocks every year since 2015.
Rudy could lodge a similar complaint for 2022, though it certainly wasn’t a championship guayabo that robbed him of the glory; another win for Slow Mo Anderson, who just can’t stop winning.
Now back to Wemby.
How would he have done if were able to play the full season? The powers-that-be in Big Ole San Antonio shut him down for the season citing deep vein thrombosis, which per my extensive research, is NOT an accolade in the bedroom. Godspeed, monsieur.
But what if the DVT had not afflicted him so? By the time the brass had put him on ice, he had accumulated 176 blocks, having played in 46 of San Antonio’s 52 games. The Spurs’ 23-29 record probably would have landed it squarely in play-in territory, which means Wemby probably would have continued playing a meaningful number of minutes to jockey for playoff experience, Poppovich-ian proclivity towards load management notwithstanding.
With this lore injected and thrombosized into our deep veins, we can take some stabs at projecting how many blocks Wemby might have had.
In the cheeriest of all multiverses, he might have ended up with something like 291 blocks. That would have been the most since Theo Ratliff returned 307 packages to sender in 2003. More likely, playing somewhere between 85% to 90% of games, he would have wound up with something like 275 blocks, which would make his blocking prowess equivalent to someone like prime Ben Wallace.
But of course, the halo surrounding Wemby is not just that he repels shot attempts like so many English infantrymen storming the lines at the Battle of Castillon. L’extraterrestre looms like an inexorable shadow over us all because of the raw potential of youth, and the relative completeness of his current game.
Compared to some of the other Block-Masters listed herein, Wemby is by far the more dynamic chess piece. In his two seasons, he has accounted for more about half of his team’s blocks. But just as impressively, the most recent iteration of his game amounted to 19% of his team’s points, 21.65% of his team’s rebounds, and 11.19% of his team’s assists.
By comparison, these numbers are all up from his embryonic Rookie Form, and all such pieces of the pie dwarf the relative contributions of other pretenders to the throne. 2015 Whiteside very nearly accounted for the same percentage of his team’s rebounds but was inferior in every other regard. Wemby roughly doubles the assists contribution of any other player and outclasses his contemporaries in points contribution by 8 percentage points.
If all goes according to plan, this will be but one of many encomia written in tribute of Victor Wembanyama. If the alien overlords whom he has defied in befriending humanity and providing it with the jubilation of premier basketball ultimately hone in on his geospatial coordinates and come to obliterate life on earth, at least we got to witness the satisfying sight of seeing the parabola of that little orange sphere completely disrupted, and sent careening into the void.
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