With a 3 point shot and no commitment to summers in China! I'm not calling for a "tank" but if the team struggles to win because the schedule is killer who am I to say no to have odds at landing no.1
I don’t see how this kid can fail if he can stay healthy. Making some absolute ridiculous shots and will be a defensive menace.
Random thought I had but I'd really like to see guys over 7 foot breakdance as a scouting metric. I bet it could tell a lot about a player. Wembenyama looks like he could breakdance. Guys like Yao and Boban are more sway side to side and move their arms types. Would be a good test for fluidity at that size.
Sure dude, remember when Yao was drafted, a mere 296 lb weakling with a classic low post game and a butt the size of Lisa Ling - he was exactly like Wemby.
https://theathletic.com/3667190/2022/10/07/victor-wembanyama-nba-draft-scouting/ […] Put simply, we have never seen anything like this before. Wembanyama is a basketball evolution all his own, a unicorn even among unicorns, the unholy melding of the best traits of Ralph Sampson, Kristaps Porziņģis and Dirk Nowitzki. In particular, Wembanyama’s ability to shoot on the move for a player of his size is something we just haven’t seen before. Porziņģis is an awesome set shooter with crazy range, but he’s not throwing a dribble 10 feet in front of himself so he can catch up to it on the move and launch into a feathery fadeaway. Yao Ming was even bigger, much stronger, and an awesome foul shooter, but he was strictly a set shooter once he got past 15 feet. You have to get down to Nowitzki’s size – a mere 7-footer – to find a real comparison. Between the size and length and the off-the-charts skill level, calling Wembanyama a generational prospect feels somewhat like calling fire an important discovery; while true, it still comes across as a massive understatement. One can argue there hasn’t been a player who felt this “can’t miss” this young since Lew Alcindor. Look, I scouted Porziņģis and Luka Dončić in Spain, saw Greg Oden play in the Final Four and watched John Wall fly past overmatched opponents at the Hoop Summit. None of them had observers slobbering and guffawing like this; not even close. […] The combined impact of the two games has been to create a truly rare event in league annals: Major buzz about the draft before the NBA has even begun its season. Usually, we need the college season to get underway before that happens, but this year the likely top three picks in the draft all play outside the NCAA system. (This could be a sign of the times as well, with insurgents G League Ignite and Overtime Elite rostering the likely second and third picks, Henderson and forward Amen Thompson.) While we’re here: The competition level in this game was significantly higher than what Wembanyama or Henderson might have faced in, say, the Big 10 or SEC. Actually, the fourth-best and fifth-best players on Wembanyama’s team were recent All-Conference players in those two leagues. For those old-schoolers who wonder if the French prodigy could be doing this at Duke or Gonzaga, donnez moi une break. We don’t know exactly what Wembanyama will be, and it’s possible that it ends up being not quite everything we’ve built it up to be. We’ve seen hot prospects short out for all kinds of reasons, whether it is failure to improve, failure to stay healthy, or failure of our own evaluation. Maybe he ends up being merely “really good,” a la Sampson and Porziņģis. On the other hand, maybe he’s an unbelievably ridiculous superfreak who will be the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of this century. In addition to the off-the-charts skill level for a player of this size, Wembanyama seems to check all the other boxes — he’s competitive, composed, mature, already speaks English fluently, and unlike some other hyped giants (such as Oden, notably) has no obvious movement or structural oddities in his elongated frame. There were 200 people here looking high and low for red flags, and they didn’t find any. So … given all that, everybody should tank, right? Especially since the second prize (Henderson) looks to be an elite player too and several other players in this draft (such as Amen Thompson, his twin brother Ausur Thompson and Arkansas guard Nick Smith) project as top-tier talents. Shouldn’t it be a no-brainer? Not so fast. […] So …. here’s the thing people forget about NBA teams and how they operate. The decision to tank isn’t just made willy-nilly by a general manager. This is one of the big-picture moves that absolutely, positively requires buy-in from ownership to pursue. And that adds another variable: Some owners are more than willing, if the moment is right. Some are dead-set against it, and some in the middle are reluctant but persuadable. And this week, the persuadability factor just went up. Waaaaay up. A general manager’s opinion on whether to tank might not have changed, but his owner’s receptiveness to the proposal sure as hell did. Not because any owners were there watching Wemby in person, but because, like I said above, this was an event. Put yourself in the owners’ shoes: The buzz factor is now through the roof. No longer is your team tanking for some unknown quantity playing halfway around the globe, a maybe stacked upon the maybe of winning the lottery in the first place. Forget that; now you’re tanking for the biggest whale in the ocean. Everyone is talking about him and everyone knows who he is. And all your fans badly want you to tank, including all the VIPs you hobnob with at games and around town. For owners, tanking just became cool. I noted the distributed probability above, but that creates another tanking incentive that we haven’t really talked about: It’s possible to tank late. We saw it last year with Indiana and, more brazenly, Portland, both of whom maneuvered into bottom-seven draft positions despite beginning the year with ambitions of a playoff run. We’re almost certainly going to get that again. Right now I have seven teams marked as “not really interested in making the playoffs” and 23 making at least a fairly serious attempt at winning games this year. Inevitably, a couple of these 23 teams will find themselves falling out of the playoff race in February and decide to shift gears into reverse. Offloading veterans at the trade deadline, strategically shutting down key players with vague injuries, and closing with a rousing 5-31 blitz to the finish (or whatever it takes) is very much in play for the right team. Of course, limits remain. Teams are still going to try to make the playoffs; the four teams that lose in the play-in round only have a combined 1-in-20 chance of winning the lottery. Discussing tanking is fun and all, but even the league’s worst team has an 86 percent chance of not getting Wembanyama. You had better have some decent alternate plans if you punt the season. So, getting back to the big picture, I think we’re basically OK on the tanking front. It’s not that nobody will tank, but it’s pointless for teams to outdo each other beyond a certain point. Additionally, the play-in carrot adds real costs to the decision for middling teams. Nonetheless, here’s where I expect to see the Wembanyama Effect: Don’t be surprised if some teams go much, much earlier than they otherwise would have. Instead of waiting ’til February, somebody might pull the plug in December. One could easily imagine a team like, say, Charlotte or Portland starting the year 8-19 and figuring “to hell with this.” Do the math: If you know landing in the bottom six or seven is the goal, and that at least three teams have basically planted their flag in the ground already, you realize there just isn’t a lot of real estate left on Tank Island. Get in early, everyone; they’re not making more. Ultimately, that’s why the tanking incentive will never totally go away regardless of what optimizations the league makes to the lottery process. Superstars have disproportionate value in the NBA, so the potential rewards are simply too great. In the case of Wembanyama, in fact, they’ve arguably never been higher.
I'm absolutely 100% in favor of tanking this year again, seriously Scoot is a ridiculous prospect too, personally I think a better prospect than Green (at the time of being draft)
