The NBA celebrates this Tuesday the lottery of the most anticipated Draft of the last decades, which will grant the lucky winning team the ticket to choose the Frenchman Victor Wembanyama, the greatest promise of basketball since the appearance of the already legendary LeBron James.
"Unicorn", "alien" or "video game player" are some of the qualifiers that LeBron himself or Stephen Curry dedicated in recent months to Wembanyama, a spiky tower of 2.21 meters with skills never seen in a Draft.
"It's incredible. I think in 2045 all the players are going to look like Victor," Giannis Antetokounmpo said. He continued: "The way he throws, he moves. It's extremely fast for its size, it can plug."
Victor Wembanyama and an enviable wingspan. Photo: AFP
"He's got a chance to be one of the greatest guys to ever play basketball, we have to be ready for this guy," the Bucks superstar said, projecting widespread sentiment in the NBA.
Wembanyama, 19, won't officially know which franchise he'll start his career in until the June 22 draft ceremony in Brooklyn, where the 30 teams will be split among the top 60 young players from U.S. universities and professional leagues around the world.
However, the surprise would be gigantic if the French pivot is not chosen by the team that wins the lottery on Tuesday, an event that will be broadcast from Chicago. Neither the NBA, which has been promoting its future star for months, nor Wemby himself hide his conviction that for the first time a French player will be the number one of the Draft.
Spectator. Victor Wembanyama (C) attended a game between the Chicago Bulls and Detroit Pistons in Paris. Photo: EFE
"There are ten days left to meet my future team. It's crazy," the young man wrote on Twitter on May 6.
Although this generation offers other gems, especially point guard Scoot Henderson, the NBA has focused on generating enormous expectation about the Wembanyama landing.
Never has a basketball promise received so much attention since a teenager named LeBron James and nicknamed The Chosen One, whose high school games were broadcast nationally and was chosen with the number one in 2003. Twenty years later it is theNBA itself that broadcasts on its platforms the games of the Wembanyama team, the Metropolitans 92 of the French league, an unusual gesture for a foreign player.
The NBA was already aware for years of the diamond that was coming but the fever for Wembanyama was just unleashed in the United States last October, when the Metropolitans 92 was invited to play two friendlies in Las Vegas against the team of Scoot Henderson, the Ignite of the subsidiary league G-League.
On the floor. Victor Wembanyama, in action with his team Metropolitans 92. Photo: AFP
The Frenchman banished any doubts about his potential with a huge average of 36.5 points, 4.5 triples, 7.5 rebounds and 4 blocks in both games. Thus, faced with the possibility of acquiring a jewel of this caliber, numerous teams launched this year into a race to finish in the last places of the classification.
The NBA, in an attempt to balance the championship, offers the worst teams the greatest options to select at the top of the Draft, which usually causes some franchises to take measures aimed at losing games. This strategy, known as tanking, intensified this campaign despite the fact that the NBA launched several threats to prevent it. The league came to fine the Mavericks $ 750,000 for sitting Luka Doncic and the rest of the figures in the final stretch of the regular phase to improve their chances in the draw.
The messiah of basketball. Photo: AFP
Tuesday's lottery will feature the 14 franchises that were out of the playoffs, each with a percentage of first-place options. Pistons, Rockets and Spurs, the three teams with the worst win-loss balance, are the most likely to win the lottery, 14% each. The other teams that yearn for the number one spot are the Hornets (12.5%), Blazers (10.5%), Magic (9%), Pacers (6.8%), Wizards (6.7%), Jazz (4.5%), Mavericks (3%), Bulls (1.8%), Thunder (1.7%), Raptors (1%) and Pelicans (0.5%).
While they all dream of a talent that will transform their destiny, Wembanyama says he has no preference for his new uniform: "I'm not worried. A player destined to become a great, no matter where he falls, will be the right place."
Source: AFP
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