The NBA draft is still more than a month away, but its biggest question has already been answered. After winning Tuesday night’s draft lottery, the San Antonio Spurs are almost certain to use this year’s No 1 pick to select teenage French basketball prodigy Victor Wembanyama. “Almost certain” is no exaggeration – according to oddsmakers at time of writing, a $100 wager on the Spurs to take Wembanyama with their pick would net the bettor just 50 cents.
It’s easy to see why Wembanyama is a shoo-in to be drafted first. At 19 years old and 7ft 4in tall, he’s already bigger than nearly everybody in the NBA and is possibly still growing. His height, however, is only a (metaphorically) small part of Wembanyama’s appeal. He does things on a basketball court which people have never seen before. He can collect his own missed three-point shot for a putback dunk, score at will over one of the best defenders in basketball and dribble past opponents like a player half his size. In what may be the greatest accomplishment of his nascent career, Wembanyama even seems to have already won the admiration of his NBA elders (not always a given, even for the most heavily hyped prospects). Two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, for example, thinks Wembanyama will eventually serve as the archetype for all future NBA players, predicting that “in 2045, everybody is going to look like Victor”.
Given his enormous potential, Spurs fans will be celebrating winning the “Wembanyama sweepstakes” for weeks (if not years) to come. They, however, are not the only ones with reason to rejoice. Wembanyama also won big last night: his career, at least the start of it, will be guided by one of the greatest organizations in basketball.
Success in the NBA is primarily the result of players’ on-court exploits and coaches’ tactics, of course, but it’s also often a consequence of off-court organizational excellence. Some franchises are run well for decades on end, while others simply aren’t. The reasons for this aren’t obvious. Personnel changes (including changes in ownership) happen regularly enough that there’s often little overlap among a franchise’s decision-makers in, say, the 1980s and the 2020s. Nevertheless, some teams seem to consistently perform poorly and squander opportunities.
It’s nothing supernatural (despite occasional claims to the contrary). Rather, the effects of seemingly small actions – an owner pinching payroll pennies one season, a player not signing with a team because he hates its city’s weather, etc – compound over years into persistent underperformance. As a result, many highly hyped young players have their careers hindered (or even ruined) by being drafted by such teams. Fortunately for Wembanyama, the Spurs distinctly do not fall into this category.
By almost every metric, the Spurs are one of the most reliably successful teams in basketball. They’re the most successful regular-season team of all time by winning percentage and, with five championship wins, have the fifth-most titles in NBA history. Moreover, unlike some of the other historically excellent franchises, much of the Spurs’ success is relatively recent (they’re also the winningest team of the 21st century). Crucially, one of the individuals most responsible for the Spurs’ success is still with the team.
San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich is the longest-tenured head coach in the NBA, having led the Spurs since 1996 and has had a hand in almost all of the team’s accomplishments. Popovich not only coached the Spurs during all five of their championship runs, but he led the team to the playoffs for 22 straight seasons (1998 through 2019), the longest streak in NBA history. Popovich also holds the record for most regular season wins by a head coach and will be inducted into the Hall of Fame later this year. Now, he gets to add “jumpstarting Victor Wembanyama’s career” to his résumé.
Big men have historically flourished with the Spurs. The team’s only two previous No 1 picks were 7ft 1in and 6ft 11in (David Robinson and Tim Duncan, respectively). Both went on to have Hall of Fame careers, spent entirely in San Antonio, which included winning MVP trophies and multiple championships.
San Antonio also trade on an exceptional track record when it comes to developing international players. Argentina’s Manu Ginobili and France’s Tony Parker (probably the greatest pre-Wembanyama French basketballer of all time) both flourished while playing under Popovich, each making multiple All-Star teams and winning multiple titles during their Hall of Fame careers with the Spurs (Parker will be formally inducted later this year at the same ceremony as Popovich.)
When considered in sum, the Spurs’ history of consistent success, particularly when it comes to developing international talent and No 1-drafted big men, makes Wembanyama and San Antonio ideal matches for one another. This, however, doesn’t necessarily vault the Spurs into contention for next season’s championship (although Wembanyama did say immediately after San Antonio won the lottery that he’s “trying to win a ring ASAP”).
The Spurs have missed the playoffs for four years running. Some of this can be attributed to purposeful “tanking”, ie poor play specifically aimed at increasing their odds at winning this year’s draft lottery. Some aspects of the Spurs’ poor play, however, can be attributed to a lack of talent; for example, San Antonio sent zero players to the All-Star game this season. They also lack big-name, high-upside young players to immediately pair with Wembanyama. The Detroit Pistons, for example, had the same odds as the Spurs of winning the draft lottery and could have played Wembanyama alongside talented point guard Cade Cunningham, the No 1 pick from the 2021 draft. The Spurs’ roster, conversely, remains a relatively blank canvas.
The most intriguing player currently on San Antonio’s squad is forward Jeremy Sochan. Also only 19, Sochan is coming off a moderately successful rookie season in which he scored 11 points per game and made the All-Rookie second team. The Spurs also have Keldon Johnson (23 years old), a 6ft 5in swingman who averaged over 20 points this year. Given their relative youth, along with their complimentary positions, sizes and skillsets, it’s conceivable that Sochan, Johnson and Wembanyama could crystalize into a formidable ‘Big Three’ in the years to come.
Even if they don’t, in addition to the players already on their payroll, San Antonio will also surely attract free agents this offseason. Off the court, Texas’s lack of a state income tax means players in San Antonio (as well as Houston and Dallas) get to keep a greater percentage of their millions, which is an attractive perk. More notably, however, NBA players love Coach Popovich, and Popovich already has personal relationships with great players across the leauge as a consequence of coaching the US men’s national team at the last two Olympics. One such Olympic alumnus is Draymond Green, the defensive savant who has won four championships with the Golden State Warriors and can opt out of his contract this summer. Popovich and Green share a mutual admiration for each other and one can imagine Green’s defense, playmaking and leadership being exactly what it takes to coalesce a young, talented team into a playoff contender.
A lot remains to be decided but, given how well suited they are to one another, it does almost seem as if the San Antonio Spurs and Victor Wembanyama were destined to work together (the conspiracy-tilting corner of NBA Twitter has a different word for it). Of course, it’s not guaranteed that Wembanyama’s potential will translate into real-world success – NBA history is littered with stories of unfulfilled promise. However, if Wembanyama’s career proves to be anything like it’s forecasted to be, it will be in no small part owing to where he first landed in the NBA. Yes, the Spurs won the Wembanyama sweepstakes last night but, by associating his future with one of the NBA’s great franchises, Victor Wembanyama may emerge as the evening’s real winner.
