Whither Wemby?

Victor Wembanyama is maybe just kind of a corny guy. I think we are all going to have to get accustomed to that. His taste in reading material could scarcely be more embarrassing shy of, like, pickup-artist instruction manuals. He seems to go out of his way to cultivate a public Man of Sophistication image, which is among other things hilariously at odds with what he's reading. He can be tediously smug when things are going well—the I'm in your head! thing from Game 4 will endure like a tattoo on his forehead forever—and the rest of the time has developed an ugly penchant for dirty shit that is unbefitting a world-class athlete and, again, makes for an unflattering contrast with the whole Serene Warrior Monk thing. Two weeks ago the 2026 NBA Finals seemed like they might be his coronation, and oh boy, were they ever not that. The general response to the New York Knicks defeating Wembanyama's San Antonio Spurs and claiming the city's first NBA championship since 1973 has been, by and large, joyful and celebratory, which is great. In its shadow, though, a consensus seems to have formed—online, if not among the relatively tiny and generally more cautious crowd of people who get paid in part to seek journalistic access to pro athletes—that these Finals exposed Wembanyama as something of a sucker and a fraud. He faded badly in second halves throughout a short series that was characterized if not defined by his team, well, fading badly in second halves. The Spurs led for more than 70 percent of the series's total game time, including by double figures in all five games, and won just one of those; they lost all three games they hosted. More specific to the gangly prodigy in question, New York's brawny frontcourt pushed Wemby around and successfully relegated the sport's tallest and lengthiest player to the game's geographic periphery for its key stretches. While Jalen Brunson—5-foot-10 on his best day, looks like he should be wearing a sweater over an Oxford shirt and teaching elementary school—was taking games in hand with Captain Ahab–grade fanaticism, dragging his team to a championship as much via sheer refusal to lose it as by anything else, Wembanyama found himself reduced to a noodular stationary jump-shooter, a mere cog in his own team's janky and coughing machinery. A few moments before OG Anunoby found in himself the superhuman wherewithal to tip in one of the most extraordinary and heroic game-winning baskets in league history, Wembanyama bricked a pair of free-throws that might have made that game-winner impossible. While his own teammate Dylan Harper—younger than him and a rookie—was making huge plays and gutsy shots and keeping the Spurs afloat in Game 5, Wembanyama was setting screens of no particular effectiveness and getting stonewalled before he could even roll as far as the free-throw line. He did not, in short, spend these Finals covering himself in glory.