Why Wemby is not the Future Face of the NBA

CULTURE

I made $1500 betting Wemby would wilt

By Hadrian Belove · June 13, 2026 · 13 min read

Speaking dramaturgically, Wemby is fundamentally an antagonist. In drama, the protagonist of a story has a goal, and the drama comes from the obstacles to that goal. In a basketball game, Wemby is the obstacle. The mission is to get that ball through a hoop, and he’s like a mythological guardian blocking your way. His superpower as a player is being a one-man zone defense that distorts and breaks the physics of the basketball court, sucking up offensive possessions into nothingness, like a black hole. He stops things from happening.

Wednesday was the single largest comeback in NBA Finals history. But for every winner, there’s a loser, and for every comeback, there’s a chokejob. So you could also say, Wednesday was the single largest chokejob in NBA Finals history. It’s a matter of perspective.

At halftime, when the Spurs’ lead had stretched out to a mammoth 29 points and the Kalshi projections on a Knicks win dropped to a measly 5%, I threw down. At first, I wasn’t betting on a win, I was just buying the dip. I figured the Knicks would stage an inevitable dignity-saving run to make a game of it, as teams of character always do, and it would rise to 10% or 20% for a neat and easy buck.

But as the game went on, the lead shrank, I hung around. It was too good. My $100 joke portfolio slowly ballooned to a thousand, then 1200 bucks, I didn’t sell. My hands hardened into diamonds. Because I had faith in one thing: Wemby would wilt. Wemby was a wilter.

Partly, it's a matter of biological engineering. He is a human experiment, an outlier. The center of gravity is too high, the levers are too long. Moving a frame that massive with the agility of a guard is a metabolic nightmare. His body is so weird he has to practice falling down just so he doesn’t hurt himself. And he's young, the dominance so total you forget you're watching a kid in his second season. He’s never been in the playoffs before.

All fine reasons. But the reason I bet on him choking is this: Wemby is fundamentally not a hero. 

NBA fans around the league witnessed Wemby’s ascendancy like Godzilla rising out of the ocean, with fear and respect. At nearly eight feet tall, he can virtually stand and touch the rim. Somehow, he can run and shoot too. It's unfair. And thus, it’s assumed Wemby will be the new face of the NBA. He will not.

Centers rarely are. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon, Shaq, all may have been some of the most undeniable forces to ever hit a basketball court, but never the protagonist or the GOAT. No one wore shoes to “Be Like Hakeem.” Shaq had the most star quality, but with an appeal to children (see: Shazaam!). It was the way kids love brontosauruses and big cartoon bears that remind them of friendly parents that can keep them safe. No one wants to be Shaq but a toddler with a He-Man power fantasy. Jordan, Magic, Bird, larger than life, but recognizably human.

The hero shoots miraculous clutch shots against all the odds; they’re little Davids slinging their rocks at Goliath’s head. Wemby is Goliath. The hero overcomes near insurmountable odds to achieve the seemingly impossible. Scoring against Wemby seems impossible. A hero isn’t an 8 foot French freak grabbing balls out of the air and dunking on proper athletes like an older brother playing Nerf against toddlers. The hero dunks ON the 8 foot French freak of nature. That’s the cover of the poster.

The best Wemby meme generated by the astro-turfed, Kalshi-funded PR division machine is the “Attack On Wemby” series, comparing him to the “Beast” Titan in the popular anime Attack On Titan. The central image is of tiny, doomed humans swarming a giant naked humanoid that plucks them out of the air and eats them whole — like a guard driving the lane, headed straight for the monstrous Wemby who waits with open jaws.

Being Gen X, I’m reminded of Bruce Lee’s Game of Death. In Game of Death, Lee must ascend through many floors of a mighty pagoda tower, with each level guarded by a new karate master, each one more powerful than the last. At the top there is the last guardian, a 7 foot tall, disturbingly mobile karate-chopping Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. A seemingly impossible-to-beat antagonist, whose dramatic function is to test Bruce Lee’s ultimate mettle and merit as a champion.

This is Wemby. The final boss.

Like any final boss, Wemby has critical weaknesses. We’ve already noted the endurance issue; teams purposely hurl body after body against him, specifically to tire him out. Others have noted his lack of a “go-to” move in clutch moments. He can finish an alley-oop like a god, and knock down an open three — but these are finishing moves, created by other players. When the team needs a hero, he has no signature shot, no sky hook, no Luka step-back three.

But mostly, I think it's endemic. It’s his nature that makes him wilt in the clutch.

Wemby is like a child star. And like most child stars, he’s a fucking head-case. He’s never had a real childhood. He was 6 foot tall by 11 years old, and (with the help of his professional athlete parents) was groomed almost immediately into stardom. He had an agent by 13. After being feted by every team in Europe, he was a pro by 15. By 22, he’s already been declared possibly the greatest player of all time, with sports prognostics predicting a decade long dominance under his slender-man spindly shadow. He’s already got an animated sci-fi series in development for French television, in which he voices a version of himself, in space. He's been a product longer than he's been an adult.

A child star’s ego is large, but fragile. They have never had the nurturing freedom of being ignored, bored, or of failing in private. Of being loved while losing. Of knowing their merit was earned by toil and trouble. And so they live in fear of not being special, because maybe all this attention will go away as randomly as it was given. They don’t naturally grow identities, they develop an act.

Here’s the tell: a normal, self-aware, bright young person has a kind of humility around public speaking. I’m not saying they aren’t cocky about what they know (basketball, folk music). But they’re smart enough to know they’re just a kid, and even be actively suspicious of anyone taking them too seriously. But for the child star, for some crazy reason adults are always listening to them. The conclusion: everyone must be idiots.

Wemby, speaking to the press, holds forth like a little professor. He dispenses fortune-cookie wisdom to adults, stroking his barely pubescent hairless chin thoughtfully as if he were a guru. He’s always tugging on an imaginary beard. His pretensions know no bounds. He’s not just a child star, he’s a French child star. Not just a try-hard, but a poseur.

It’s all so performative. He played Chess with fans in Washington Square Park. He visited NASA, does math in his head, and explains what dark matter is at press conferences to reporters like a bright boy impressing his beaming parents with an oral book report (“Wemby, tell your granma about dark matter. Isn’t he just so smart?”). He started a Spurs book club that even his teammates couldn’t brook, dwindling to just him and Harrison Barnes–the oldest vet on the team, kindly humoring him. He studied with Shaolin monks (while a private black-windowed van pulled up with his high-protein meals he could wolf down away from vegetarian eyes).

He says he won’t endorse soda brands because he doesn't want to “kill kids,” instead he wants us to drink his “plant-based” energy drinks, “Barcode”.. Is there anything more meaninglessly virtue-signaling than a “plant-based” energy drink? What the hell even is a plant-based energy drink? (Though I can’t think of anything more American than a meat-based energy drink, made from hot-blooded deer hearts carved out of a fresh kill). Just shut up and sign a Sprite deal. Instead he’s with Louis Vuitton.

He doesn’t drink, or party, and, worse, has the French gaul (sic) to brag about it. Michael Jordan binge-drank on a golf course for 36 holes, then went straight to the arena (probably behind the wheel) to score 40 points. Then, between NBA Finals games, his teammate Dennis Rodman went on a 48-hour Vegas bender that ended with Jordan dragging him out of his hotel room while bimbonic supermodel Carmen Electra hid behind the couch. They won the next day.

Meanwhile, between Finals games, Wemby unwound in Gramercy Park (a gated rich man’s park that requires a key), sketching statues of Hamlet — the least heroic figure I can think of for a sports star to gaze upon. Hamlet was not a winner.

Now let’s take Jalen Brunson. Brunson is a classic hero. He is the prototypical American action star. Silent, ugly, tough as nails. Street smart, but deeply unpretentious. Observe how he takes a press conference:

Reporter: "Do you guys feel like you're built to win either way at this point?"

Brunson: “Yes."

Reporter: "Someday I'm gonna get a two-word answer from you."

Brunson: "Yes…sir."

Brunson is a classic underdog. 6 foot 1 in shoes, he wouldn’t look out of place on your typical high school varsity squad. You have friends taller than Brunson. While Wemby was the prospect of a generation, an obvious franchise-building genetic freak that teams tanked for an opportunity to pick first in the draft, Brunson barely went second round. He is the least likely of heroes, which makes him the best kind. Four years as a back-up, then a sidekick, then a starter. When he signed with New York everyone said he was overpaid. Now he’s a star.

And no matter how outmatched he seems, how poorly he begins, how much he struggles, he shows up in the clutch. He plays fourth quarters like a man collecting a debt. And he does this for a team that was not expected to win. They are without an obvious, dominant star. Their owner is a maniac, and their fans are savages. But with a hodge-podge of talent and the power of teamwork, just keeps upsetting the odds.

Which of these people do you want to be? Who are you rooting for? 

Winners don’t love winning. They hate losing. And to hate losing, you have to lose, hard, painfully and repetitively. Larry Bird, dirt-poor in French Lick, his father gone by suicide, shooting alone until the cold drove him inside. Bill Russell was so afraid of losing he vomited before games.

No one knows this more than a Knick. Behind the glee and celebration of the Knicks magical season lies deep anxiety, terror, and depression. Look in a Knick fan’s eyes and you see desperation behind the excitement. Superstitions abound, like OCD built around trauma. Teased over and over again with decades of near-misses, most Knicks fans have an easier time picturing loss than victory. Reportedly, the mood at Madison Square Garden was volatile, spooky. It’s been one giant orgasm denial; New York has been edging itself for 40 years. When they finally win, the city’s gonna pop like Mt. Vesuvius. It is dramatically the best of all possible outcomes, and therefore, the most likely.

Wemby has choked in this series not once, but twice.

In Game 2, with the score tied and just twelve seconds left, he panicked and threw the ball right into the back of his teammate, where it bounced right into Brunson’s hands. Brunson drew the foul, and calmly sank the game-winner from the line like a gangster. Seconds later, Wemby got one last buzzer-beating look, a clean twenty-footer, and clanked it off the back rim. Still a child, he doesn’t handle failure well. We never saw him speak after this embarrassing manhandling, because he slipped out of the stadium unseen, earning a warning from the league for skipping the mandatory press conference.

If the Spurs lost the series, it would be remembered as a pivot, and that moment would make NBA highlight reels for decades. ESPN 30 for 30, here we come. Yet it is already forgotten. Because, amazingly, Game 4, the game I bet on, was even worse.

With a minute to go, and the game down to a single possession, my friends and I could have sold our prediction-market shares for a thousand bucks. It was the obvious thing to do. Instead, we let it ride, and then watched the Alien get sent to the line with a chance to take the lead. Diamond hands. Looking at his humidified face, beading with sweat, I knew he was gonna miss. Choke, choke, I muttered to my friends in the sports bar. And choke, choke, he did: one free throw clanging after another. Wemby wilted, and we got the full 1500 bucks.

Of course everyone says that he’s just young and underdeveloped and he’ll grow into a totally dominant star with an easy dynasty. But I don’t think Wemby really wants to be champion, he wants to be special. His first “Alien” shoe brand has a glow-in-the-dark sole that reads “Be Unique Every Day.” Like the Elephant Man, he’s a freak, but unlike the Elephant Man he doesn't want you to just know, “I am not an animal…I’m a human being!”

Instead, he’s saying I AM AN ALIEN. It’s not a bad thing, it's a good thing! I’m a mutant! Mutants are actually better than people! I will join you, Magneto, and they will worship us as gods! It’s a classic supervillain arc, really.

There is hope for Wemby. By losing in the most embarrassing way, by being humiliated on a national stage, by feeling the sting of defeat, he has created the most relatably human moment of his entire life. Watching him at the press conference, too rattled to even remember what happened (“it was blurry”), he became authentic.

“I messed up,” he said. “It just hurts.”

And for the first time, I kind of liked him. Maybe he can be a hero. Now that he has an origin story.