favorite players of Victor Wembanyama on NBA right now they are Kevin Durant and Giannis Antetokoumpo. It makes sense, since they are both taller than almost everyone else in the league and have a full game. Wembanyama might find some similarities.
But comparisons with them, or anyone else, are not what motivates Wembanyama. When the French teenager who measures 2.19 meters will arrive in the NBA next season (according to most insiders, it would be the # 1 choice in the draft if it were made today) he won’t be interested in becoming the next Durant or Antetokounmpo. OR Dirk Nowitzky.
The path he wants to take, he said in an interview with the Associated Press, it will be all yours.
“I’ll tell you something that has been constant in my life, all my life, since I was a kid, even before I started playing basketball,” Wembanyama said.
“I’ve always tried to do something different. I don’t even talk about sports or anything. In every field I always try to be original, something unique, something that has never been done before. And that’s how they really worked for me. . ” things in my life. I don’t know where it comes from. I think I was born with it. I’ve always tried to be original. ”Unique, that’s the word.
“My goal is to get something you’ve never seen,” he added. It might already be this.
That’s why the Metropolitans 92team from the most important French basketball league, has crossed the Atlantic to play a couple of exhibition matches against the G League Ignite and has another outstanding prospect in the next draft, the shooting guard Scott Henderson.
An exhibition to show it
The exhibits in Henderson, a suburb of Las Vegas, are intended to introduce Wembanyama to basketball fans in the United States.
Wembanyama wasted no time in showing its class. The French phenomenon blocked the shots near the edge and on the perimeter, recovered rebounds, moved around the field, made screens, scored after a good maneuver, dove for a fumble and even served as a point guard during a possession. All this in the first two minutes. He scored 37 points, but his team lost 122-115 to Ignite. Henderson scored 28 points.
About 200 scouts and NBA executives were in attendance. Reporters from France, Brazil and Canada came to watch both games. Wembanyama did not disappoint.
“It’s good for basketball,” Ignite coach Jason Hart said. “It’s good for both our show and theirs.”
Wembanyama seems to live up to it all.
Shoot from 3 points with incredible ease., almost always free from the efforts of defenders whose outstretched arms do not come close to the ball or their field of vision. He moves with solvency on the board. He knows how to drive and pass the ball. It is creative. And he is an athletic prodigy, gifted with genes inherited from Felix Wembanyama and Elodie de Fautereau: his father was an athletics star, his mother excelled in basketball.
Few, if any, prospects since LeBron James in 2003 carried the banner of the future star guaranteed at 18.
“I think I was made for this,” Wembanyama said. “I was expecting everything that was going on. I’m living up to expectations. I’m not surprised what’s happening to me. And yes, it’s happening, that’s how I can handle it and I think I’m managing it well.”
He already speaks almost perfect English., which will be useful considering that next June, already 19 1/2, he will be recruited by a team and will move to the United States (or Canada, if Toronto secures the choice to take Wembanyama). He has a hard time understanding that he only has a few months left to live in his native France.
But neither is he bothered by what is happening and what is to come. He speaks with confidence. That confidence, however, is not the product of arrogance. You know it’s okay. And he wants to improve.
AP
Source: Clarin
