The Basketball Thread

[NikkiCFC 7,587]

Lebron all time leading scorer. 

[NikkiCFC 7,587]

With nothing exciting about Chelsea these days football kind of becomes my 3rd sport right now after basketball and tennis. Really enjoying NBA playoffs, every night great games. I'm Worriors fan. Bucks out now in a thriller. 

[Vesper 27,329]

Victor Wembanyama scouting report: What the San Antonio Spurs are getting

France's Wembanyama is the highest-upside prospect to enter the NBA since LeBron James. 

https://theathletic.com/4522983/2023/05/16/victor-wembanyama-nba-draft-scouting-report/

Here’s everything you need to know about Victor Wembanyama, the 19-year-old French phenom expected to go No. 1 overall in this June’s NBA Draft.

Background

Wembanyama has long been considered one of the best prospects in his age group. His father, Felix, was a 6-foot-6 high-level long jumper. His mother, Elodie, was 6-foot-3 and played basketball and helped teach Victor the game. He has two siblings, both of whom play basketball, and grew up in the Parisian suburbs and joined the Nanterre 92 developmental team at a young age.

Wembanyama emerged as an elite prospect for NBA teams at the U16 European Championships in 2019, where he averaged nine points, 10 rebounds and five blocks per game as a 15-year-old. He continued to ride wave of momentum while playing for Nanterre’s developmental Espoirs team and got his first taste of professional basketball in early 2020 for Nanterre. Then he quickly emerged as a first-team player for Nanterre in 2020-21, starting 10 games in the French League and winning the Pro A league’s Best Shot Blocker award as well as its Rising Star award. That summer, he went to the U19 World Cup as an underage 17-year-old and dominated again. He averaged 14 points, seven rebounds and five blocks, putting up a dominant 22-point, eight-rebound, eight-block game in the championship against the United States team led by Chet Holmgren, with France losing by just two points. He continued his ascent as a 17-year-old, moving to French power ASVEL and earning starting minutes both in EuroLeague and French League play. He led the EuroLeague in blocked shots as a teenager, an absurd accomplishment, and largely held his own and showcased flashes of elite play mixed with some inefficiency as a young player exploring the boundaries of his game. He won the French League Best Young Player award again but lost EuroLeague Rising Star award to Knicks’ pick Rokas Jokubaitis. He decided to leave ASVEL at the end of the season, signing a contract with Metropolitans 92 in Paris, where he would play for French national team coach Vincent Collet.

Wembanyama exploded in his season with Metropolitans, going from surefire No. 1 overall player to truly generational talent due to his improvement in terms of offensive shot creation. The NBA put together a showcase game for Wembanyama and potential No. 2 overall pick Scoot Henderson in September 2022. Wembanyama left scouts salivating and in awe, scoring 37 points in the first game and then scoring 36 points and grabbing 11 rebounds in the second. He went on to carry Metropolitans toward the top of the French League and currently leads the French League in scoring, rebounds and blocks. Metropolitans is third at the moment behind only EuroLeague powerhouses Monaco and ASVEL.

It is worth briefly noting that Wembanyama has had a history of injuries. In December 2020, he suffered a stress fracture in his leg. In November 2021, he broke a finger that forced him to miss one month. In December 2021, he suffered a right shoulder blade bone bruise that forced him to miss over a month. In June 2022, he suffered a muscle injury that forced him to miss the rest of the French League season. None of these are recurrent, but scouts have taken notice that he continues to miss time. He has not missed a single game for Metropolitans in his pre-draft year and is considered to have a very professional personality and demeanor. 

Strengths

Wembanyama has elite length for a center. He stands over 7-foot-4 in shoes with a near-8-foot wingspan and will be among the longest centers in the NBA from day one. Beyond that, Wembanyama has a relatively skinny yet well-proportioned frame that should continue to be able to add weight. He’s already over 230 pounds and has retained a large amount of the coordination and athleticism that has made him special as an offensive player. He’s not an elite run-and-jump athlete, but he’s good and more than anything possesses terrific hand-eye coordination and fluidity for his size. He gets off the ground quickly as a jumper, even if his vertical leap likely isn’t massive. His balance is unlike that of any “super giant” who has entered the NBA previously.

Wembanyama’s superpower is his ability to defend in the paint. He is the best shot-blocking prospect to enter the NBA in a long time. He led EuroLeague in blocked shots as a 17-/18-year-old and blocked twice as many shots as any player in the French League in 2022-23. He possesses a terrific sense of timing and positioning and has clearly been taught well. His length and ability to move changes the geometry of the game both vertically and on the ground. He pairs this with strong anticipation. He’ll crash down from the elbows or rotate over from the weak side quickly and can bait potential shooters to try to go up without realizing how quickly he can cover the ground. Vertically, he’s enormous, and his length ends up covering the top of the rim. On the floor in the paint, he swallows up drivers and covers an enormous amount of ground due to how mobile and balanced he is. Also, he doesn’t really need to elevate to impact shots at the rim, which stops him from fouling. He averaged just two fouls per game this season and is an impediment just by sticking his arms up.  

Wembanyama is a strong defender across the court as well. His instincts and awareness in drop coverage are strong, and he has elite potential there. Because of his length and understanding of angles, he plays the gap between the ballhandler and roller well. He can both play in retreat where he cedes space or more aggressively closer to the level of the screen. He keeps almost everything in front of him, but when he does get beat, he has terrific recovery skills due to his length. This causes real hesitancy from ballhandlers. It’s hard for them to feel comfortable pulling up because of how capable he is getting out to the perimeter even when he’s dropping to the foul line. You can also feel this in closeouts, where he can speed up shooters. Moreover, he plays with a reasonable amount of bend and can slide to cut off players in space. He’s not the quickest guy in the world, but he keeps his feet active and uses his length and angles well and plays on balance.  

Offensively, Wembanyama took a significant leap in 2022-23, actualizing the talent that has existed in scouts’ eyes for a long time. He’s a ridiculous shot creator for someone this big. The threat is immediate because he’ll grab and go and pressure the defense off the glass. He’s very good in transition because of how quickly he covers ground, and his handle is ridiculously tight for a 7-4 center. He looks like a wing out there with how he sets up defenders then strings together moves to attack the top foot. He loves the isolation pull-up and is a big fan of the right-foot jab step into the left-hand dribble stepback to the left. He developed the ability to hit side-step pull-ups this year and does it to both his left and his right, and he can string together multiple moves to separate to get to his stepback as well. He loves the hesitation crossover into a pull-up and uses his stride length to really extend out and create feet of separation on stepbacks. He has counters for days to how defenders attempt to play him. He’ll hit inside-out dribbles into spinning turnarounds, fake spin-shimmies into midrange pull-ups, mid-post face-up fadeaways, etc.

Wembanyama also is a creative ballhandler when loading into his shot. He has superb balance and touch combination and made multiple running floaters from behind the 3-point line earlier this season that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else attempt. There isn’t really a way to contest him because of how high his release point is. He does a good job of using it to its utmost advantage too. He’ll catch and keep the ball high while gathering and doesn’t need a ball dip to load into the shot, which is important as it refers to catching-and-shooting and taking advantage of potential mid-post shots. He also hits shots off movement and made 47 percent of his shots from the field this season despite taking over two-thirds of them from outside of 5 feet away from the basket. It’s very easy to imagine him as a primary end-of-shot-clock option in the NBA. He can always create a reasonable look and makes an obscene number of contested shots. He made 38 percent of his shots between 9 and 20 feet, but that’s a strong number given how absurdly contested these shots were and what the degree of difficulty was in creating them. He’ll have more space to operate in the NBA.

Wembanyama also has real driving capabilities because of how long his strides are and how much ground he covers. He combines the threat of his pull-up shot with drives off hesitation dribbles well. He doesn’t have a great first step, but once he gets defenders leaning, it’s hard for them to stay in front because he can gather into a shot off a drive from the 3-point line due to his length. He can do it out of isolations if he gets someone off-balance or out of spot-ups if a heavy closeout comes due to the respect defenders give his shot. He’s very similar to a younger Giannis Antetokounmpo in that way but doesn’t yet have the same level of strength Giannis developed. Still, Wembanyama does a good job of playing through contact once he gets that downhill first step. In the NBA, he’ll have even more open driving lanes due to the spacing of the court, which should allow him to continue to be impactful as a finishing driver. He can also occasionally post his man and bully him to the rim purely due to his stride length or ability to shoot over the top. If you try to play him tight and get physical with him, he’ll go up and under and extend his way to the rim.  

Unsurprisingly, Wembanyama also is an awesome finisher at the rim. Per Synergy, he made 73.1 percent at the basket this season and was at 68.3 percent in the half court, a very strong number given that he self-created a ton of these looks off drives. A lot of his finishes came off putbacks, where Wembanyama averaged about 2.5 points per game, fourth-most in the French League behind only fellow 7-foot-3 supergiant Youssoupha Fall. He’s a constant lob threat if he’s in the dunker spot and has good touch with both hands. He maintains contact balance well as a finisher and has very easy lift as a finisher. He has very high-level potential as a pick-and-roll finisher due to his balance and hand-eye coordination and poses the pick-and-pop threat as well. He’s so multi-faceted and versatile as a scorer that it’s hard to find ways to completely shut him down.  

GO DEEPER

John Hollinger's Top 20 players in this year's NBA Draft

Weaknesses

There are a few, but not many. Wembanyama has a higher center of gravity, which means he can be moved around a bit more often than you’d expect. He does have strength and should fill out well physically as he ages, but right now, he can have some issues getting knocked off his line. That high center of gravity can sometimes come into play when he’s moving laterally in space. He can sometimes get out-leveraged and beaten by a guard who gets lower than he does. He’s excellent in recovery, but those spaces become more and more open at the next level. He’s great with his angles but will need to keep improving upon always having the right ones.  

Wembanyama sometimes struggles to see open passing reads and make plays when he’s on the move and sometimes gets a bit too focused on scoring as a driver. He does a great job of drawing defenders and forcing help but doesn’t always take the best advantage of bending the defense. He sometimes makes his passing reads in set plays way too obvious. Metropolitans often ran plays where he was out high and would try to find cutters, but he’d completely telegraph what he was doing. Anecdotally, more of his turnovers come via the pass as opposed to ballhandling turnovers. Teams can frustrate him with late digs and weakside doubles. I would expect teams try to aggressively double-team him early in his career and force him to learn these passing reads. He can get a bit too sped up.  

Wembanyama’s shooting can also be a bit inconsistent. He goes through spurts where he just can’t find the bucket. A lot of the percentage issues have to do with shot selection, as he often ends up taking a ton of absurdly tough ones that others can’t even create. But it’s worth noting that his numbers aren’t great. In total, he made 32.5 percent of his jumpers and 32.4 percent of his catch-and-shoot 3s and only 20.7 percent of his 3s off the bounce. The highlights look great, but the results aren’t always there. I don’t think he engages his lower half enough with good shot prep off the catch right now. Catching-and-shooting often seems like a second option when he gets the ball, so he doesn’t always look ready to fire immediately. He has a tendency to miss long on his shots, which I think is due to inconsistent rhythm and engagement of his lower half. He can be a bit stiff.

All of this is eminently fixable, and there is zero reason not to buy Wembanyama as a shooter long term. He’ll get stronger in his lower half and work with a legitimate shooting coach who helps to improve his overall mechanics. Wembanyama’s touch is so good that he’ll find mechanics that work for him. But early in his career, you might see some real inconsistency in terms of the actual result. Because he’s so efficient at the rim and will be playing with better guards who can find him easier buckets, he should stay above the median efficiency line even as a rookie. But he might go through spurts where the shot doesn’t fall. 

GO DEEPER

Hollinger and Partnow: What's going on in front offices at this time of year? Plenty

Summary

Wembanyama is the highest-upside prospect to enter the NBA since LeBron James. There are things that could go wrong here and hold him back from that type of upside — particularly, if his body breaks down and his durability becomes a question, or if the passing and playmaking never quite come along to the levels they need to. But it’s hard to overemphasize how incredible Wembanyama’s long-term potential is on both ends of the floor.

He will immediately be the biggest, longest player in the NBA, which allows him to change the geometry of the court defensively. He has great instincts and recovery ability on that end. But moreover, he is a legitimate shot creator at center or even at the four who can create off the bounce and knock down shots with ease off pull-ups or drives to the rim. He’s a terrific finisher inside due to his length and touch and is already starting to experiment with shots that could make him special, such as some of the turnaround pull-ups, the fake-spin shimmies and even the weirdo floater 3s. He is a historic prospect, one well within the tapestry of former elite big prospects such as Bill Walton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon, Patrick Ewing, Shaquille O’Neal and Tim Duncan. It remains to be seen if he can live up to their hype, but his game fits within the modern construct of basketball just as well as those players’ games did in their eras.

Wembanyama has every chance to have the kind of storied career all those players had as Hall of Famers. It is actually somewhat easy to envision Wembanyama’s upside as being the best player on planet Earth someday, which is a sentence I have never written about another prospect before.

[Vesper 27,329]

 

Edited May 17, 2023 by Vesper