I have no idea how good Victor Wembanyama is going to be. But, of course, I also know how this ends.
Players like him, no matter the sport, are closer to mythological beings than mortal athletes. Shohei Ohtani, Patrick Mahomes, Caitlin Clark — they are stories that exceed their actual play, and the knowledge of their greatness exceeds what anyone has actually seen. Wembanyama is the newest of that group; the most unknown, but also maybe the most limitless.
It is rare that you can confidently say a player’s ceiling is “the greatest of all time,” but Wembanyama’s legitimately is. But no player in the history of basketball has had Wemby’s exact mix of size, skill and shooting. There is not one prospect, player or theoretical basketball concept that can exceed Wembanyama’s ceiling: unstoppable on offense, stops everything on defense. You literally cannot build a more destructive basketball player.
But success is never that simple. If every seven-foot unicorn the NBA has ever seen panned out, we would be overflowing with Greatests of All Time. Kristaps Porzingis, Ralph Sampson, Bill Walton… Dragan Bender, it would be a long list. Save for that last guy, what do all those guys have in common?
First, they all had, or are still having, great NBA careers! Sampson was going to revolutionize the game with Hakeem, and Porzingis and Walton have three rings between them. But second, every blurb of their careers has to have an acknowledgement of how much fans, teams and even players felt they could have achieved had it not been for catastrophic injuries.
Wembanyama missed a huge chunk of last year with a blood clot issue, but recovered fully and had a supernovic start to the 2025 campaign. But quite literally while writing this piece, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported that Wembanyama would miss “a few weeks” with a calf strain, delaying Wembanyama’s scheduled takeover of the NBA by at least that long. It sucks, there’s nothing anyone can do about it and the whole NBA community is biting its nails, wondering if Wemby will be able to stay healthy long term.
Why the tallest NBA players get injured more often is pretty simple physics; longer limbs equals more strain on joints and anatomical choke points, which leads to more injuries. Over the course of hundreds of NBA games, this risk compounds on top of existing injuries. Wembanyama is probably has the highest mobility-to-height ratio in human history, so this is not a small risk.
But the limit legitimately does not exist, and so it’s hard to talk about Wembanyama without using the same independent-dependent clause formation: “he is incredible, but that’s only if he can stay healthy.”
Recently, too many great players have been reduced to that single sentence: Zion Williamson, Joel Embiid, Kawhi Leonard. And it’s a function of the load management era that the best ability has become availability. Injuries have become expected, and especially for big men, nobody is shocked when they miss time. If Wembanyama’s Hall of Fame plaque reads, “one of the most uniquely gifted players in the history of sports, but struggled with injuries throughout his illustrious career,” will anyone be surprised? Will we even be surprised as it’s happening? No, we’ll just be disappointed.
I don’t want Wembanyama’s legacy to be one of disappointment, but I also know I can’t control injuries or the randomness of an NBA game. I want to appreciate Wembanyama without spending the next 15 years asking “what if,” but that simply might come with the territory.
It’s also worth asking if an attitude shift is in order. Can greatness be enjoyed separate from bad luck? Can we all agree to separate injury from career and simply judge what is fair to judge? Or is luck just part of being great?
Perhaps a better move is to stop worrying about legacy when a player is 21, accepting that hindsight is 20/20 because we cannot predict the future. I want a player with Wembanyama’s potential to be an all-time great, but only time can tell us if that’s going to happen.
For now, Wembanyama will be the NBA’s greatest anxiety—capable of everything but guaranteed nothing. In a way, he’s a metaphor for life itself; if nothing else, you can put that on the plaque.
