Victor Wembanyama Steps Into the Light
At twenty years old, in his third season, the Spurs' centre is remaking what a basketball player can be.
There is a particular civic ritual that San Antonio has rehearsed before, in the long Popovich winters, when the Alamodome district and the streets feeding the AT&T Center would fill with something between anticipation and proprietary pride, as though the city itself had grown the talent in its limestone soil. Victor Wembanyama is not David Robinson, and he is not Tim Duncan, but the city appears to be deciding, somewhere in the slow collective way that cities do, that he belongs in that procession. He is twenty years old, named the unanimous Defensive Player of the Year in only his third NBA season, and he is, by nearly every measure the sport applies to itself, the most complete two-way player in professional basketball.
