Pat Connaughton knows what an open shot feels like. As a nine-year veteran in the league, he has played hundreds of games and developed a feel for space and when there is enough room.
Connaughton felt that familiar feeling again when his Milwaukee Bucks faced the San Antonio Spurs in early January. With about 8 minutes left in the fourth quarter, Giannis Antetokounmpo double-teamed and found Brook Lopez alone on the right wing. Spurs’ Julian Champagnie, Connaughton’s defender, scrambled to cover him.
When Lopez caught Antetokounmpo’s pass, the Spurs player covering Champany’s rotation was 27 feet away from him, with one foot in the paint and the other on the other side of the court. Connaughton knew Lopez would throw swing passes, and he usually only had to stay two to three feet away from his defender to shoot. In other words, Connaughton is open. Two seconds later, the ball left his hands.
Then, suddenly, he died in the air.
“If I thought he could get the ball, I wouldn’t take the shot,” Connaughton said later.
7-foot-4 rookie Victor Wembanyama rotates in the corner and catches the ball at 12-foot-7.
“When you’re playing against him, every second counts, right? So the swing has to be faster, and when you think you have enough room, you actually don’t,” Connaughton said. “We talked about it after the game and it was an impressive thing.”
Wembanyama not only broke the game of basketball, but also broke the open perception of basketball physics within the NBA. He has blocked seven 3-pointers this season, still far from the league lead, but most notably he has broken the sense of inevitability that defenders used to have.
“Has anyone told me this?” Wembunyama said when asked about his lengthy layoff. “Yeah, all the time. Sometimes during the game, sometimes after the game. But it happens.”
The modern era of the NBA is the result of evolving understanding and space warfare. There’s always been more space outside the three-point arc than inside, but over the past decade, teams and players have started using that area more than before. It’s been long enough for player development and regulation to adapt to the dramatic changes in the game since Stephen Curry began his rise to prominence.
However, while the player expands the horizontal plane to create space, the vertical plane remains the same. At this level, every player knows what an open shot looks and feels like.
At least that’s what they did before Wembanyama.
“He’s definitely going to take that space back,” Spurs teammate Tre Jones said.
Phoenix Suns guard Grayson Allen, the league’s leading three-point shooter, fell victim to Wembunama in the first week of the season. He felt that Wembanyama was caught between him and another defender and wasn’t fully committed to guarding him. But anyway, Vunbanyama got to Allen’s shooting position, which has only happened once in Allen’s 421 three-point attempts this season.
“He’s one of probably two guys in the NBA who can stop the ball from where he is,” Allen said.
Allen is right. Connaughton’s jumper was labeled “wide open,” a metric used by the league’s tracking metric to identify shots taken when the nearest defender is more than six feet away. Todd Whitehead, a product designer at Synergy Sports who provided tracking data for this story, said Wembanyama is one of only two players to have blocked three shots this season. The name is Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert.
“Part of my job is figuring out what those labels should be,” Whitehead said. “So having Wenby destroy what I wanted to do and make something happen that seemed physically impossible — that didn’t really frustrate me, but it made the data points look like (it was) wrong, Because he’s so unusual.”
According to Synergy, 86% of Wembanyama’s three-point field goals fall under the “wide open” label, which is one of the “worst” three-point field goal percentages in the league. In other words, when an opposing player takes a shot, he is rarely considered “close” to them enough to impact them. But his league shooting percentage on “open” three-pointers is just below 36%, which is significantly lower than the league average of 39.2%. In other words, when Bunyama is matched up, an “open” three-pointer is not open.
Of course, the team all knows Wembanyama. Before the Dallas Mavericks faced the San Antonio Spurs in the 2023-24 season opener, assistant coach God Shammgod strapped padded extensions to his arms in an attempt to emulate the extra-long-limbed French guard.
It’s official: The Mavericks are preparing to face the Spurs, specifically with 7-4 rookie Victor Wembanyama, God Shammgod filling the Wemby role. “Wimpy! “Wimpy,” he yelled as he defended Irving with his artificial length. pic.twitter.com/cKmgnP0M1n
— Brad Townsend (@townbrad) October 21, 2023
However, the first official shot attempt against Wembunama on the team’s opening possession came from Kyrie Irving, who drained a 17-foot mid-range jumper that was quickly blocked by the San Antonio rookie. .
“I don’t mind that,” Owen said later, delighted to be the first official victim of the Wembanyama block. “The right side of history.”
At the very least, that lesson stuck with Irving for the rest of his games and in back-to-back games against the Spurs this season. Last month, he defeated the towering big man with a signature highlight-reel performance.
What Irving learned in October was something that Wembanyama’s teammates realized much earlier. Jones, the Spurs’ starting point guard, took a crash course in the team’s first public practice before the season began. “I think I have an open mind,” he said. “We pretty much all know that when we open up.”
Spurs backup center Dominick Barlow described the feeling of shooting around Wembanyama as a “humbling experience.”
“We’ve taken hundreds of aerial photos in our lives,” he said.
Barlow and Jones are faced with a strange phenomenon: they try no Overly adjusted to Wembanya’s presence because being his teammate meant they didn’t have to face him in actual games. Still, whenever Wembanyama wears another color of their scrimmage jersey, he inevitably pops up in their minds.
“The red light goes off in your head,” Jones said. “When he’s around, you’re definitely aware of where he is and know where he is at all times.”
Opponents were not so lucky. Irving said he gave up what resembled a blocked pull-up jumper late in the game and instead found a shooter near Vunbanyama. Allen said he might back off further. Connaughton thinks it might even require him to shoot it differently.
“You’ve got to take Stephen Curry’s moonball,” he said.
Wembanyama’s blocks mostly come at the rim, but the league’s best shooters all convey similar fears. Like many of the best rim protectors in the league, Wembunyama can not only block shots, but also prevent opponents from attempting shots. However, Wembanyama did the same thing with three-pointers.
“When you get on the court with him,” Irving said, “you get a better idea of where he’s at.”
Over the past decade, as offensive players have taken up more and more floor space and used it to their advantage, defensive players have not had much recourse. Jumpers have always dominated the air, using space well above defenders to avoid them.
But Wembunyama didn’t just make it to the league; He also elevated himself to previously unattainable heights. Now, he’s at least a counterattack player.
“[He defies physics]as I understand it,” Connaughton said. “Now I’m readjusting.”
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(Photos: Mark Blinky, Ronald Cortez/Getty Images. Illustration by John Bradford/ Competitor)
