Ben Maller Show Best of the Week

Victor Wembanyama had just lost the NBA Finals. The San Antonio Spurs had blown double-digit leads in every game of the series, and in the final seconds of Game 5, the 7-foot-4 French phenom missed the last shot, untucked his jersey, and walked straight off the court without shaking hands with the victorious Knicks. He did not stay to watch them celebrate. He did not offer congratulations. He went to the locker room, then to the podium, and then into the offseason. For Ben Maller, that moment crystallized everything wrong with the way the basketball world has been talking about Victor Wembanyama.

The myth versus the moment

Maller's central argument is that the NBA's marketing machine built Wembanyama into a myth—"the unicorn," "built for the moment," "the next face of the league"—and the Finals exposed that myth as hollow. The numbers look fine on paper: 26 points, 11 rebounds, and 3.5 blocks per game in the series. But Maller insists those stats are a trap. "There is nuance to this," he says. "With the game on the line, where was he?" The Spurs led by double digits in every single game of the series and lost four of five. Wembanyama made critical mistakes in at least three of those four losses. Maller describes him as "petrified, terrified, and zombified" in crunch time, wandering "like a rumba stuck in a corner." The Parisian prodigy, he says, became "the Parisian puddle