Why Victor Wembanyama is the NBA’s next big thing | CBC Sports

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Eight days after Chicago’s NHL team won the right to select Connor Bedard, another teenage phenom touted as a generational talent is up for grabs in tonight’s NBA draft lottery. The big (and we do mean big) prize is Victor Wembanyama, the 19-year-old French phenom who many are calling the best basketball prospect since LeBron James went pro two decades ago.

Wembanyama’s exact height remains something of a mystery after he didn’t attend the draft combine. But he’s listed between 7-foot-3 and 7-foot-5, which would make him one of the tallest players in the NBA. Like a traditional centre, Wembanyama’s height (and eight-foot wingspan) create nightmares for opposing scorers as he can block or alter their shots without even leaving his feet.

What really sets this big man apart, though, is that he plays offence like a guard. Wembanyama can handle the ball, create shots for himself and his teammates, shoot threes from anywhere, hit stepbacks and throw down highlight-reel dunks. “Kevin Durant crossed with Rudy Gobert,” is how the Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor described him, implying Wembanyama is a mix between one of the most unstoppable scorers in NBA history and a three-time Defensive Player of the Year.

Wembanyama put his extraterrestrial array of skills on display last fall in Las Vegas, where his French-league club Metropolitans 92 played a pair of exhibition games against the NBA’s G League Ignite — a developmental team featuring guard Scoot Henderson, expected to go No. 2 in the draft. Wembanyama scored 37 points with seven 3-pointers and five blocked shots in the first game before deploying his full arsenal of inside-the-arc moves to score 36 in the next one — all with the pressure of NBA scouts, executives and players eyeing him from courtside.

Some of the sport’s greatest players can hardly believe what they see. Durant, who might be considered the inspiration for Wembanyama’s game, called the teenager “inspiring.” Steph Curry compared him to a video-game character. “He’s like a [NBA] 2K create-a-player… cheat code-type vibes.” LeBron invoked mythical creatures. “Everybody’s been [called] a unicorn over the last few years, but he’s more like an alien. No one has ever seen anyone as tall as he is but as fluid and as graceful as he is out on the floor.”

The best odds of winning tonight’s Wembanyama sweepstakes belong to the Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets and San Antonio Spurs, who each have a 14 per cent chance after finishing with the three worst regular-season records.

Unlike the NHL version, every team in the NBA draft lottery is allowed to win the No. 1 pick. The group of 14 includes the Toronto Raptors, who have the second-lowest probability at just 1 per cent. It’s a long shot, for sure, but teams in that range do win the lotto from time to time. Most recently, Cleveland had just a 1.6 per cent chance in 2014 when it won the right to select Canada’s Andrew Wiggins first overall.

While Wembanyama won’t make his NBA debut until the fall, we might see him in this summer’s Basketball World Cup in Asia, where France and Canada will face off in the group stage. Though it’s not certain that Wembanyama will participate in the tournament, there are good signs: he played in European qualifiers last fall and winter, and the head coach of the French national team also happens to be Wembanyama’s coach at Metropolitans 92.

The draft lottery takes place tonight at 8 p.m. ET, right before Game 1 of the Western Conference final between Denver and the Los Angeles Lakers. The Eastern final, featuring Boston and Miami, opens Wednesday night.

In other NBA news, the Philadelphia 76ers fired coach Doc Rivers today after losing Game 7 of their second-round series vs. Boston.