Pat Connaughton knows what an open plan looks like. As a nine-year veteran of the league, he’s taken hundreds, developing a sense of space and when there’s enough.
In early January, when Connaughton’s Milwaukee Bucks took on the San Antonio Spurs, Connaughton found that familiar feeling. With about eight minutes left in the fourth quarter, Giannis Antetokounmpo drew a double team and found Brook Lopez alone on the right wing. San Antonio’s Julian Champagnie, Connaughton’s defender, rushed to cover him.
As Lopez caught Antetokounmpo’s pass, the Spurs player tasked with covering Champagnie’s rotation was 27 feet away, one foot in the paint and the other on the other side of the floor. Connaughton knew Lopez’s swing-swing pass was coming and he usually only needs two or three feet of separation from a defender to make his shot. In other words, Connaughton was open. The ball left his hands two seconds later.
Then, he suddenly died in the air.
“I wouldn’t have shot if I thought he was going to be able to get it,” Connaughton said later.
Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-4 rookie phenom who had rotated from the corner, met the ball 12 feet, seven inches in the air.
“Every second counts when you play against him, right? So the swings have to be faster, and when you think you have enough space, you really don’t,” Connaughton said. “We talked about it after the match, it was impressive.”
Wembanyama is not only breaking basketball, but also the very perception of openness – of the physicality of basketball – within the NBA. He blocked seven 3s this season, far from the league lead, but what stood out was how he disrupted the inevitability defenders felt.
“Have any guys said that to me?” Wembanyama said when asked about his long fences. “Yeah, all the time. Sometimes during the match, sometimes after. But it happens.
The modern era of the NBA is the result of an evolved understanding and war for space. There have always been more beyond the 3-point line than inside, but over the past decade, teams and players have begun to use that territory exponentially more than before. It’s been long enough since Stephen Curry’s rise began for player development and standards to adapt to the game’s massive upheaval.
Yet while players expanded the horizontal plane to create space, the vertical plane remained constant. At this level, every player knows what an open shot looks like.
At least, they did before Wembanyama.
“He’s taking over that space, that’s for sure,” Spurs teammate Tre Jones said.
Phoenix Suns guard Grayson Allen, the league’s 3-point percentage leader, fell victim to Wembanyama in the opening week of the season. He felt like Wembanyama was between him and another defender, not fully committed to guarding him. But Wembanyama still managed to reach Allen’s shot, which has only happened once in Allen’s 421 attempts from behind the arc this season.
“He’s probably one of two guys in the NBA that can shut down the game from where he was,” Allen said.
Allen is right. Connaughton’s jumper was labeled “wide open,” which the league’s tracking metrics use to identify shots made when the closest defender is more than six feet away. Wembanyama is one of two players — the other is Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert — to have blocked three such shots this season, said Todd Whitehead, a Synergy Sports product designer who provided the tracking data for this story.
“Part of my job is to figure out what those labels should be,” Whitehead said. “So for Wemby to come and put a damper on what I’m trying to do, to make something that seems physically impossible happen – it doesn’t really frustrate me, but it makes it seem like the data point is (it’s) wrong because it’s so unusual.
According to Synergy data, 86% of Wembanyama’s contested 3-pointers fall under that “wide open” label, one of the “worst” rates in the league. In other words, when opposing players shoot, it is rarely considered “close” enough to them to affect them. But the league is shooting just under 36 percent on the “wide open” 3s he’s played, significantly lower than the league average of 39.2 percent. In other words, a “wide open” 3 is not wide open when Wembanyama contests it.
The teams of course know Wembanyama. Before the Dallas Mavericks faced San Antonio in the first game of the 2023-24 season, assistant coach God Shammgod attached padded extensions to his arms in a fun attempt to simulate the incredibly long-limbed French defender.
It’s official: The Mavs are gearing up for the Spurs, specifically 7-4 rookie Victor Wembanyama, with God Shammgod playing Wemby’s role. “Wemby!” Wemby,” he shouted as he came out to defend Irving with his artificial Wemby length. pic.twitter.com/cKmgnP0M1n
– Brad Townsend (@townbrad) October 21, 2023
And yet, on the team’s first possession, the first official shot attempted against Wembanyama came from Kyrie Irving, who scooped up a 17-foot jumper from midrange that was quickly blocked by the San Antonio rookie.
“It doesn’t bother me,” Irving said later, amused at being the first official victim of a Wembanyama block. “The good side of the story.”
And that lesson, at least, stuck with Irving for the rest of the game and back-to-back matchups against the Spurs this season. Last month he had a signature highlighted finish on the long big man.
What Irving learned in October is what Wembanyama’s teammates realized even earlier. Jones, the Spurs’ starting point guard, got a crash course during one of the team’s first open gym runs well before the season started. “I felt like I had an open eye,” he said. “When we’re open, we pretty much know.”
Spurs backup center Dominick Barlow described the feeling of shooting past Wembanyama as a “humbling experience”.
“We’ve taken hundreds and thousands of open photos over our lifetime,” he said.
Barlow and Jones are faced with a strange phenomenon: they try not to over-adjust to Wembanyama’s presence, because being his teammate means they won’t have to face him in a real match. Yet Wembanyama is an inevitable presence in their minds whenever he wears the other color of their scrum jerseys.
“The red light in your head goes off,” Jones said. “You are definitely aware of his presence and know where he is at all times.”
Opponents are not so lucky. Irving said he missed a shot similar to the blocked pull-up later in the game to find a shooter away from Wembanyama. Allen said he might just move back further. Connaughton thinks it might even force him to shoot differently.
“You have to take the Steph Curry moon ball,” he said.
Wembanyama’s shot blocking mostly happens at the rim, but these are the league’s best shooters who all convey a similar fear. Like many of the league’s best rim protectors, Wembanyama not only blocks shots, but also deters his opponents from attempting them. Yet Wembanyama also does the same thing on 3-point shots.
“When you hang out with him,” Irving said, “you’re a little more aware of where he stands.”
Over the past decade, as offensive players took up more and more space on the court and used it to their advantage, defenders didn’t have much recourse. Jump shots have always had air superiority, using space well above defenders’ ranges to avoid them.
But Wembanyama didn’t just enter the league; he also launched himself to previously inaccessible heights. And now there’s at least one player fighting back.
“(It defies physics) as I understood them,” Connaughton said. “Now I recalibrate.”
(Photos: Mark Blinch, Ronald Cortes / Getty Images. Illustration by John Bradford / Athleticism)