Las Vegas likes to remind prospective visitors that its triple-digit summer temperatures are a dry heat. But at the Thomas & Mack Center for NBA Summer League on Friday evening, as the energy of a sold-out crowd of more than 17,000 fans permeated from the smoldering parking lot to the seats of the arena, the human-generated humidity was as pervasive as the excitement. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” one media member turned and said to me as we anxiously waited, with the rest of the arena, for 6pm tip-off of the San Antonio Spurs’ first game. “And I’ve been coming to this thing for years.”
The fever pitch was brought on by the likes of a 7ft 5in, 19-year-old French phenom named Victor Wembanyama, who was about to step on the court for his first ever game as an NBA player. The hype around Wembanyama has been, to put it mildly, immense: teams have had plans to tank for the chance to draft him since he was in high school, and basketball talking heads have gone so far as to say that if he doesn’t end up as one of the greatest players of all time, he’ll go down as a “disappointment”.
