Victor Wembanyama Prepares to Become ‘Genuine’ Face of the N.B.A.

Business|Wembanyama Prepares to Become ‘Genuine’ Face of the N.B.A.

One day last summer, Harrison Barnes, a longtime N.B.A. veteran, was finishing up an off-season workout with Victor Wembanyama, his 7-foot-4, then-20-year-old San Antonio Spurs teammate and one of the league’s most dazzling young stars.

Barnes was new to the team — he had recently been traded from the Sacramento Kings — and new to Wembanyama. But he was already beginning to understand that Wembanyama was precocious in more than one way.

In the N.B.A., many teams track shooting percentages and shots made in games and at practice as a way of gauging their players’ progress. The Spurs had a chart that tracked both, but ranked players based on makes. Barnes told Wembanyama that metric felt insufficient. Wembanyama pondered Barnes’s concern. Then he got to work.

He picked up a marker and started to sketch out some thoughts on a white board. He wondered if a graph might be better than a chart and if it should include week-to-week changes. Wembanyama plotted ideas for three theoretical players, whom he labeled A, B and C. At one point, Barnes heard the word “coefficients.”

“He was really trying to wrap his mind around like, ‘How do you get better at that?’” Barnes said. “How do you chart what progress is?”

That day, Barnes saw into Wembanyama’s psyche — the sincere search for knowledge and human connection that he’s carried with him through the early part of his N.B.A. career. It leads to the kind of authenticity that marketers crave, and fans are drawn to.